



SMALL THINGS 



HELEN MACKAY 






Class. 
Book.. 



i JH,.J_*«» 



CiopyrigM]^^?^ 



COP^TtlGHT DEPOSrr. 



JOURNAL OF SMALL THINGS 



other Books hy 
Helen Mackay 

Accidentals 
Stories for Pictures 
The Cobweb Cloak 
Half Loaves 
Houses of Glass 
London one November 



JOURNAL OF 
SMALL THINGS 



^0 c.^v^<ijJ5^c-v-^ f 11*U.»-r^.^w^ y 

HELEN MACKAY 




New York 

DUFFIELD AND COMPANY 

1917 






Copyright, 1917, by 
DUFFIELD AND COMPANY 



MAR \?. 1917 



•CLA455881 



FOR 

MARGARET 



PREFACE 

^X*HOSE who have read Mrs. Mackay's book, 
"*• which she entitled Accidentals, will know 
exactly what to expect from her new book, 
Journal of Small Things. Like the early 
one it consists of a series of little sketches more 
or less in the form of a diary, vignettes taken 
from a very individual angle of vision, pictures 
in which the hand of the painter moves with 
exquisite fineness. They are singularly grace- 
ful, very delicate and also very pathetic, these 
random memories of a sympathetic friend of 
France, who describes what she saw during 
the opening stages of the war in Paris and in 
provincial towns. The precise quality of them 
is that they are extremely individual and inti- 
mately concerned with little things — episodes half 
observed, half forgotten, which cluster round a 
big tragedy. The author's mind is bent on the 
record of such little things as might escape some 
observer's notice, but which to her give all the 
gait md savour to her experiences. 



Preface 

Listen to this. **I want to make notes of 
things, not of the great things that are happening, 
but of the little things. I want to feel especially 
all the little everyday dear accustomed things, 
to take hold of the moods of them, and gather up 
their memories, to be put away and kept, and 
turned back to from always afterwards. It is as 
if they were things soon to be gone away out of 
the world and never to be again." 

Wherever she moves, Mrs. Mackay carries with 
her this exquisite sensitiveness to things which 
we might rashly call insignificant or unessential, 
and it adds immensely to the poignancy of her 
sketches and to the truth of her record. How 
valuable is her method we can judge from another 
extract concerned with "The Eiver." ''I know 
why the river goes so slowly, lingering as much 
as ever she can, and a little sadly. It is because 
just here she leaves behind her youth and wildness 
of great mountains, her mood of snows and rocks, 
cascade and woods and high rough pastures, 
cow-bells and mountain-horn. Going down into 
the classic countries, infinitely old, those deep, 
rich countries, she pauses here, between the high 
clear lift and lilt and thrill of mountain music 
and the cadenced melody of Provence." 

The figures of the narrative are for the most 
part only outlined against this background of 



Preface 

vividly remembered things. But however faint 
the tracery, the character clearly emerges. 
Whether it be Madame Marthe, or the apache 
girl Alice, or Claire, or the old Cure who was 
going to preach a fierce sermon until his eyes 
fell upon the pathetic upward look of his congre- 
gation, and especially of Madelon, and then forgot 
all his harsh words — from beginning to end the 
various figures live and move before our eyes. 
The record is sad of course; it could not be 
otherwise than fuU of a keen pathos almost unre- 
lieved. But there is never any false sentiment 
nor any touch of the vulgar or commonplace. 
Mrs. Maekay's book is the work of a sincere and 
genuine artist. 

W. L. COURTNEY. 



PART I 
From a House on a Road to Paris 



From a House on a Road to Paris 
Sunday, July 26th, 1914 

WHEN we came back from Mass, up from the 
village by the rue du Chateau and through 
the park and the garden, the yesterday's papers 
were arrived from Paris. 

I delayed down in the parterres, it was so 
beautiful. There had been rain, and the sun- 
shine was golden and thick on all the wet sweet 
things, the earth of the paths, the box edges, 
the clipped yews, the grass of the lawns, the rosea 
and heliotrope and petunias in the stately garden 
beds. 

There is a certain smell in old formal gardens, 
that seems to me always to mean France. It is 
like the stab of an arrow. I feel it, swiftly, in 
my heart, and stop and hold my breath, and say, 
"This is France." 

The news in the papers was strange. 

We thought we would go to the village, to the 
Place, and feel what the village felt. 

3 



Journal of Small Things 

We went along the terrace and around between 
the south tower and the moat to the entrance 
court, and across the moat bridge, where the 
watch-dogs were chained one on either side, to the 
green court, and out of the big wrought-iron, vine- 
covered gates, to the Place aux Armes. 

All the village was there in its Sunday dress, 
under the lime trees. 

The swallows were flying, high about the Dun- 
geon Tower and low across the big old grassy 
cobbles of the Place. They were crying their 
strange little cry. I thought, "They are calling 
for storm." And yet the sky was blue and gold 
behind the Dungeon Tower. 

We went to get the papers in the little dark 
shop that smells of spices and beeswax and shoe 
leather. 

I asked : What did Monsieur Crety think of the 
chances of war? 

He shrugged his old shoulders, and said he had 
some fine fresh chocolate and nougat out from 
Paris. 

We went back and read the papers and ate the 
chocolates and nougat on the terrace. 

A host of little white butterflies kept clouding 
over the terrace steps, between the pots of roses 
and heliotrope. 

There was a great brief thunderstorm while 

4 



Sunday, July 26th 

we were at lunch, and then the sun came out. 

We motored through the wet sunshiny country-, 
Boftly dipped and softly lifted, blue-green forest 
and wide ripe harvest fields, blue and purple and 
crimson beet fields, long low brown and rust-red 
to\^^ls with square church towers, Sunday people 
out in the doorways, and swallows always flying 
low and crying. 

"We had tea in Soissons, at Maurizi's, and went 
to the cathedral, where the offices were over, and 
to the pastrycook's, Monsieur Pigot's, to buy some 
cherry tarts. 

Home by the long straight road between the 
poplars. 

It was so cold suddenly that one imagined 
autumn. There was a wind come up, and some 
yellow leaves were flying with it. 

After dinner we had a fire lighted in the tiled 
room. The heat brought out all the sweet- 
ness of the roses in the blue bowls, and the 
flames sent lovely lights and shadows to play 
along the old stone walls. 

I do not think I would be afraid if it were not 
for my dreams. 

Every night I have dreamed of galloping horses 
and thunder — or cannon, I don't know which — 
and of blood, dripping and dripping down the 
chateau stairs. I see the blood in red pools on 

5 



Journal of Small Things 

the worn old grey stones of the stairs, and in 
black stains on the new carpet. Some of the 
nights I have stayed up, walking the floor of my 
room that I might not sleep and dream so horribly. 



Monday, July 27tK 

^Tp HE papers make things look better ; we think 
-■■ it cannot be, cannot possibly be. 

But I am always afraid, because of my dreams. 
My dreams have been very bad all night. 

I was in the potager most of the morning, work- 
ing hard. 

In the afternoon some neighbors came to tea. 
They came from quite far, motoring across the 
forests, and none of them had known the house. 

I loved showing them the old place that is not 
mine, the colours that are faded and worn till 
they have become beautiful, the things that by 
much belonging together are fallen into harmony. 

I do not believe that the people of these old 
houses can love them quite as hopelessly as 
strangers do. 

There is a certain special peculiar chateau smell, 
that trails down long galleries, and lingers on the 
stairs, that lurks in far corners of the rooms, and 
abides in all the cupboards, and behind the 

6 



Monday, July 27th 

tapestries, and in the big carved chests, that 
clings to wood and waxed floors and stone, and 
stirs along the heavy sombre walls, and that 
means France, like the smell of old gardens of 
box and yew. It stabs one — always the arrowy 
perfume — and makes one feel France with an 
odd intensity. From a far way off one would be 
homesick remembering it. 

"We had Monsieur Pigot's tarts for tea, and sat 
for a long time about the dining-room table, 
talking of how afraid we had been of war, yester- 
day. 

We went up into the Dungeon Tower and down 
into the souterrains, and then all along the ram- 
part walls. 

I love the way the little town crowds up close 
to the ramparts, the cobbled grass-grown streets, 
the roofs all softened and coloured by ages and 
weathers. 

A child laughed down in the street; a woman 
called to it; there was a scamper of little feet, 
and the two of them were laughing together. 

Off beyond the roofs we could see the blonde 
of the ripe grain fields, and the purple of the 
forests. 

I had so intensely a sense of its all being for the 
last time. I said to Manon, *'It can't last, it is 
too beautiful. ' ' 

7 



Journal of Small Things 



Tuesday, July 28th 

ONE feels, in all these days, as if there were a 
great storm coming up. I keep thinking all 
of the time, there is a great storm coming up. 
That is an absurd thing to make note of, as if it 
had some strange meaning, as if it were not just 
that in all these days, really, always there is a 
storm coming up. 

I never have known such storms, nor yet such 
sunsets. The sunsets are like the reflection of 
great battlefields beyond the world. One is 
frightened because of the sunsets, more than be- 
cause of the storms. Every day while the sun 
shines there is the rumble of thunder about all 
the horizon. It is like the cannon of my dreams. 
All the time, while the sun shines, great thunder- 
clouds are gathering upon the horizon, mounting 
up from the horizon, white and yellow, and purple 
and black. The sunshine is heavy, and thick; 
you do not know if the sky is dark blue or purple, 
and at sunset the dark cloud-shapes threaten and 
menace. 

Whatever one does, one has the feeling of doing 
it before the storm, in the teeth of the storm. 
When the storm does come, with its crashing and 
blinding, it brings no relief. It is as if these mid- 

8 



Wednesday, July 29th 

summer storms meant something for which the 
whole world waited. 

And that feeling of the end of things grows 
always stronger. There is no reason. Nobody, 
here at least, troubles about war. 

This morning v/e were caught by a wonderful 
thunderstorm out in the fields. 

Now from the terrace we are watching the 
sunset, all of thunder-clouds, purple and blue and 
black, and of fire. 

Three of the white peacocks have come up to 
tea with us, under the big cedar. 



Wednesday, July 29th, late of 

the night 

T WENT up to Paris. I thought if I could feel 
"■■ how Paris felt to-day, I would know if the 
menace is real. Here one knows nothing. 

There is sunshine and rain, and the fields are 
white to the harvest, the heat hangs over the 
long white roads, and the shade of the forests is 
grateful. 

The people of the little town go about their 
ways; their sabots clatter on the cobbles, and 
their voices have part with the shrilling of cigale 

9 



Journal of Small Things 

and the call of the swallows. The children out of 
school, at noon and at sunset, play in the Place 
aux Armes, and the women come there to market 
in the mornings, under the limes, and after work 
the men lounge there against the moat wall. 

But since Sunday I have so strange a feeling, 
a sense of its being the end of things. The end 
of — I don't know what. I want to make notes 
of things, not of the great things that are happen- 
ing, but of the little things. I want to feel especi- 
ally all the little everyday dear accustomed 
things, to take hold of the moods of them, and 
gather up their memories, to be put away and 
kept, and turned back to always afterwards. 

I want to make notes of the sweetness of my 
room to wake to, all the garden coming in through 
the drawn blinds. 

I want to put away and keep my memory of 
the fragrance of the garden, and its little voices, 
bird and bee and grasshopper and cricket and 
stirring leaf. I want to remember things I saw 
from my window — the terrace with its grey stone 
mossy parapet; the steps between the pots of 
heliotrope and roses; the parterres, the old 
vague statues, the crouching sphynxes — beauti- 
ful because they are broken and deep in 
roses — the trimmed yews, the paths and box 
borders and formal beds of flowers; the wall of 

10 



Wednesday, July 29th 

trees around; tlie glimpses through the trees of 
the town's stained, blurred roofs, and of grain 
fields and the forests. 

I want to remember the little clover leaf table 
for my breakfast tray, the bowl of sweet-peas, 
the taste of the raspberries. 

I want to remember the Long Gallery, the cha- 
teau smell in it; the clear green stir of the limes 
in the entrance court under its windows; the 
stairs that I kept dreaming about, with the dark 
Spanish pictures hung along them, and the 
armour on their turnings. 

I want to remember the bird's nest in the lan- 
tern over the entrance door, and the begonias in 
the beds along the wall; the big dogs dragging 
at their chains to come and meet me, the huge 
tumbling puppy, the gardener's babies, Therese 
and Eobert, bringing Therese 's new rag doll to 
show me. 

I started, motoring, only about 10 o'clock for 
Paris. 

It was market day in the Place; there were 
the rust-red and burnt-umber awnings and the 
women's blue aprons and clattering sabots. 

There were many magpies in the road. "Une 
pie, tant pis; deux pies, tant mieux," and one 
must bow nine times to each of them. 

The country was dim and blue in the gauze 
II 



Journal of Small Things 

lights of the morning. The road was empty be- 
tween the poplar trees. It was good to see the 
peasants at work in the fields, and the life of the 
villages going its way in the morning streets. 

I tried to get the papers in Compiegne, but 
they were not yet come. 

There were many soldiers about. 

It was the road through Senlis and Chantilly. 

The trainers had the race-horses out at exercise 
in the misty forest roads. 

I thought, "There can't be war." 

Luzarehes and Ecouen, and St. Denis and then 
Paris. 

I got out of the car on the boulevards. There 
were many people out and I went with the 
swing of the crowd up and down. It was 
good to be in the swing of a crowd. People 
hurried and people dallied; people stood and 
looked into shop windows; people sat and sipped 
things on cafe terraces; people pushed and 
elbowed; people stopped and stood where they 
were, reading the noon papers; strangers spoke 
to one another, if the swing of the crowd threw 
them for an instant together; everybody looked 
at one another with a queer new sudden need of 
each the other, and they all felt, more or less, 
one thing together. 

After a while I went to my own home. 

12 



Wednesday, July 29th 

I thought I had never seen the Place de la Con- 
corde more beautiful, oval and white, or crossed 
the bridge with a deeper sense of going home. 

My own little Place was very quiet, all the 
big houses closed; nobody left but the sentinels 
before the Palace and the concierges in their 
doorways with their cats and canaries. 

Our concierges and I were more glad even than 
usual to see one another. Old Boudet in his 
habitual shirt-sleeves, feeling, evidently, particu- 
larly socialistic, was yet quite tolerant of me ; and 
sweet, slow, fat, very respectable mother Boudet, 
whose gentleness always seems begging one to 
excuse shirt-sleeves and politics, was so ready to 
cry that I kissed her. 

Our rooms were sad, things moved back and 
covered over, blinds closed. I did not stay long 
in those rooms. 

I did not try to see any one. It was not 
people I had wanted, only Paris. I started back 
early. 

I want to remember all the things of the way 
back into the country; every thing of the fields, 
red warm ploughed earth and fresh-cut grass and 
tall clover; every thing of the forests, lights and 
mists and shadows, depths of moss and fern ; every 
thing of the villages, stone stairways and hearth 
fires, the pot-au-feu, cows and people's living. 

13 



Journal of Small Things 

At Compiegne I stopped in the Grand' Place to 
read the news scrawled in chalk on the blackboard 
before the Mairie. 

A sense of things that were happening came to 
me less from the words on the bulletin than from 
the faces of the people in the crowd before it. 



Thursday, July 30th 

Yj^ ARLY in the morning a friend of mine tele- 
■^-^ phoned from her people's chateau across the 
two forests, to tell me that her husband was 
arranging for her to take the babies to-morrow 
up to Paris. 

He said that in '70 the Germans had come that 
way, by the grand old historic road, down upon 
Paris. The chateau had then passed through 
dreadful times. If there were war he would have 
to go out on the first day. He would have his 
babies then far off from the danger he did not, 
of course, believe in. 

She told me all he said. She thought it was a 
great bother. "Would we come over that after- 
noon to tea f 

I picked sweet-peas and raspberries down by 
the well, and wrote a lot of letters in my 
north-tower room. 

14 



Thursday, July 30th 

That her husband felt like that about it, filled 
me with a sense of disaster — like the thunder and 
red I kept dreaming of. 

We motored over after lunch, through the soft, 
vague, intimate country that has no especial 
beauty and that is so beautiful. 

Some one called to us from the children's wing. 
It was "Miss," and she said, "No one will come 
to the door ; go straight in, Madame is there. We 
are leaving, now, in five minutes." 

The children's mother stood half-way down the 
long white gallery. 

She looked very small and young. 

She said, "He won't let us wait till to-morrow. 
He has telephoned. We are going now, in five 
minutes. ' ' 

Down the long white length of the gallery, we 
saw the children's grandmother in the billiard- 
room, sitting against the big south window. 

She had the little baby in her arms, and the two 
bigger ones stood close against her. 

I went to her. 

She said, "You see, I am minding the babies." 

She said that just because one had to say 
something and not cry. 

We went away quickly. 

Wide misty fields under another red war sunset. 
I thought, how one felt war in the sunset. 

15 



Journal of Small Things 

As we went, dusk came, gathering, deepening, 
very soft and kind. The fields and sky were 
darkly blue. There was a clear edge of the world, 
between the fields and the sky. And over the 
edge of the world there was a slim little new white 
moon. 

There was a small clear singing of field birds in 
the dusk, and there were bats abroad, and swal- 
lows. 



Friday, July 31st 

nr^HE beggars came as usual to the chateau for 
■*' their Friday morning sous. There were the 
usual dozen of them; old men, and women with 
babies, and old women, and Margotte, the girl who 
was innocente, with her nodding head and hands 
that would never keep still. They came out of 
their holes in the marble quarries, and from no- 
body knew quite where, according to their long 
custom. All that was just as usual. But they 
were not as usual. 

They were angry because Venus and Olga, the 
great Danes of the moat bridge, barked at them. 
Venus and Olga always barked at them, but the 
beggars never had been angry before. Before, 

16 



Friday, July 31st 

they had been, always, apologetic and conciliatory. 

An old woman with wild white hair screamed 
at the butler who came with the sous, and a young 
woman with a baby in her arms and two babies 
hiding in her skirts, shook her fist at the chateau 
windows. There was a sound of growling, snarl- 
ing voices, more ugly than the dogs' barking, in 
the court of the lime trees. 

I went out to talk with the beggars. I was 
afraid of them, ridiculously and terribly, as one is 
afraid of things in dreams. That especially 
terrible fear which belongs to dreams, exagger- 
ated, absurd, seemed to be fallen, suddenly, some- 
how, upon everything. 

I was afraid of the wild white hair of the old 
woman in the shawl, and of Margotte's twitching, 
clutching, crazy hands. 

I do not want to write about this day. I will 
always try not to remember it. 

After dinner we walked in the garden and along 
the rampart walls. We went to feed the rabbits. 
How absurd to be heartbroken because it may 
be the last time that we ever shall feed cabbage- 
leaves to the rabbits ! 

Now, writing in the north-tower room, I feel a 
strange commotion in the village. How wide- 
awake the village is, so late! There are footsteps 
going up and down the streets, up and down, and 

17 



Journal of Small Things 

voices, under the ramparts. The sound of foot- 
steps and voices is strange in the night. Why are 
the people going up and down like that? Of 
what are they talking? There is the sound of 
a drum. 

The sound of the drum comes across the moat, 
past the Dungeon Tower, through the lime trees 
of the entrance court, along the dim halls and 
corridors. 

The drumming stops. 

A man's voice takes up the reading out, very 
loud, of something, to the hush that has fallen 
on footsteps and voices. 



Saturday, August ist 

** I ^ HIS has been the day of waiting. Every- 
where, every one waited. 

In the Place aux Armes people stood and 
waited. The men waited to be told what to do. 
The women waited, each one of them staying 
close to her man. The children hung on to 
their fathers' hands. 

In all the little towns along the road to Paris 
it was like that. 

In the larger towns there was much movement 
i8 



Saturday, August 1st 

of soldiers about in the streets. All the red kepis 
v/ere covered with blue. I wondered why. 

The fields were empty. The work of the fields 
was left, flung down. The scythe lay in the 
sweep it had only half cut. 

From Louvres already the men were gone. 
Only women and old people and children were 
left, in the length of the long street. 

At the porte de La Chapelle we and a hay-cart 
going into Paris, and a small poor funeral com- 
ing out to the cemetery of St. Ouen, were all 
blocked together. The gendarmes were question- 
ing the peasant of the hay-cart, who stood in his 
blue blouse at the head of a big sleepy white horse, 
and answered sulkily. One of the croque-morts 
told us that the order for general mobilization 
was posted up on the walls of Paris. I stared at 
his shiny top hat and black gloves that were too 
long in the fingers, and tried to realize what it 
meant. 

The streets of our quarter are empty, and more 
strange than the streets and the boulevards we 
came through, where crowds were swaying up 
and down. 

Madame Boudet and I were afraid to go across 
and read the words of the white oblong placard 
that is pasted up on the wall of the Palace. 



19 



Journal of Small Things 



Paris, Sunday, August 2nd 

T7IRST day of the mobilization, the state of 
•*■ siege is declared throughout France. 

Already the many gardens of this old quarter 
are deep in the colours and odours and melancholy 
of autumn, and give autumn's fatefulness and 
foreboding to all the streets and rooms. I 
thought when I waked to it, has this sense of 
autumn always meant the end of many more 
things than summer ? 

With one's coffee to read — 

First day of the mobilization, the state of war 
is declared throughout France. 

How silent this Paris is, this special part of 
Paris, of houses that close proud heavy doors 
upon all they feel, of streets withdrawn from 
thronging and demonstration. 

In my room it is like waking to the silence that 
is beyond the end of the world. 

So this is one way war begins, not with shouting 
and singing, but with a great silence. 



?Q 



Tuesday, August 4th 



Monday, August 3rd 

'T^ HEY go. They all go. There is nothing I can 
•*■ say of it. I can only feel it, as they go. 

I, I am a stranger, I have no part in it. I have 
no right to agony and pride. 

I went and sat on a bench in the Cour la Reine, 
where already the leaves are falling. 

One of my friends came and met me there, and 
we sat on the bench together, where the yellow 
leaves fell slowly. We never talked at all. 

Her husband had gone the night before. 

She said, *'I am so glad that it is now, when my 
boy is just a baby." She said, "I have prayed, 
and prayed, all these days, if it has got to be, let 
it be now, when my son is just a baby. ' ' 



Tuesday, August 4th 

/^ THER people will write beautiful things of it 
^^ — it is so beautiful. 

How beautiful it is, this going forth of all that 
is young and gay and fearless, of all that means 
our ideal and our faith, without singing and 
shouting, to battle. 

There are no grand words, they only go. 
21 



Journal of Small Things 

And none of the women cry, till afterwards. 

You see them laughing as they help their boys 
carry the bundles. 

And you see them coming home through the 
streets afterwards, each one alone and proud, 
crying quite noiselessly. 

Sometimes the people who feel things most, 
remember only the smallest things. 

There was an old woman with a push-cart full 
of pears, this morning, in the rue Boissy d'Anglas, 
who ran and ran as fast as she could, panting, 
out of breath, to give her pears, all of them, to 
the blue boys of an infantry regiment passing 
with their blankets and knapsacks. 

I remember that, and that it was a beautiful 
blue-and-gold day, with a flaming, thundering 
sunset. 



Wednesday, August 5th 

TKEEP thinking back over those last days of 
•*■ peace, that were so precious, and nobody knew. 
The Sunday that was to be the last, what 
memories has it given the women to treasure, the 
men to carry away with them? Memories of such 
small absurd things have become sacred, or become 

22 



Wednesday, August 5th 

terrible. The men may loose those memories in 
their great spaces of battle, but the women must 
stay with them in the rooms. 

Against the great background of these days it 
is queer what small absurd things stand out. The 
greatest days of all the world — and how terribly 
worried we are that Louis has gone off without 
his little package of twenty-four hours' provision, 
the bread and chocolate and little flask. It was 
ready for him and on the table in the hall, and 
every one forgot it; and he was gone, and there 
it was, a ridiculous thing to sob over. 

Those women who did not cry at the station, 
what absurd things they sobbed over, afterwards, 
at home — his golf sticks in the corner, his untidy 
writing-table, the clothes, all sorts, he had left 
flung about the room. How many of them will 
remember always that second pair of boots he 
had to take with him, that simply couldn't be got, 
that had to be hunted over Paris for, desperately, 
as if of utmost importance, all his last day? 
However could she have got through that last day 
if it had not been that she must keep up because of 
the boots? 

In the afternoon, at the Kond Point of the 
Champs Elysees, my fiacre was held up for the 
passing of a regiment on its way to some station. 
A woman and a little boy were marching along 

23 



Journal of Small Things 

beside one of the men, going with him just as far 
as they might go. The woman had no hat, and the 
sun was very hot. Her hair was tumbled across 
her eyes. The little boy was holding tight to the 
edge of his father 's long blue coat. 



Thursday, August 6th 

"pOOR little Charlotte's baby was bom to-day, 
-*■ the day after its father went out. And it 
is dead. A boy — and he had so wanted it to be 
a boy. 

Friday, August 7th 

'T^ 0-DAY I went with a friend of mine to Notre 
-■- Dame des Victoires, where she prayed. 

All those starry lights, and all that dusk of 
kneeling, beseeching people. 



Saturday, August 8th 

TN the afternoon went with Chantal to the Gare 
■*• d'Orsay, then to the Austerlitz, and the Lyon, 
trying to find a way for her and the babies to go 
home to the Vaucluse. 

24 



Sunday, August 9th 

People are camped out about the stations; aU 
the streets are full of them, waiting to get places 
in the line before the ticket windows, 

Foulques came to dine. It is his last night. 
He goes out to morrow. He was very quiet. I 
have never seen him quiet like that before. Last 
night, down in the country, he had got through 
with all the good-byes — Claire, and his home, and 
the little son; I suppose there was nothing left 
for him to feel. 

Old Madame Boudet has a letter from her son, 
who went on Tuesday. She is very happy be- 
cause he says his next letter will be from Berlin. 
She is a little anxious because he speaks no Ger- 
man. Father Boudet forgets that he is socialist 
and anti-militarist, because he is so proud that his 
son should be a soldier of France, His shirt- 
sleeves are no longer symbolic, they mean just 
that, for thinking of the hero, he has no time to 
think of his coat. 



Sunday, August gin 

TV TIMI 'S birthday : cake with six candles, and the 
•^ •*- little girl from upstairs come with her Miss 
to tea. 

25 



Journal of Small Things 

Monday, August loth 

^X^ HERE is a sort of dreadful comfort in know- 
"*• ing that their going off is over. 

They are gone. 

The women saw them off, helped them hurry 
their things together — those bundles, boots, 
something to eat in the train. Every one had 
laughed. 

The last things are over — the last night, when 
he slept so well and she watched; the last sitting 
down at the table together; the last standing 
together in the room; his last look around it, and 
her last seeing of him there; the going out at 
the door. 

The last going out of the door together. There 
was the bundle to carry, and to laugh over. 
Everybody's motor had been taken, everybody's 
chauffeur was gone with all the other husbands 
and sons. Omnibuses and taxis were gone. The 
metro was not running, nor the tram. How to get 
to the station — such confusion, and such laughing 
over it. 

The station, somehow. And the crowd — such 
a crowd. And all the crowd was just one man 
going off, and one woman who could bear it. 

There had been just one bearing of it, and then 
it was over. 

26 



Monday, August 10th 

How silent Paris is ! 

It is one of those hot veiled days, when every- 
thing is tensely strung, high pitched, and yet no- 
thing seems to be quite real. 

The leaves are falling in the Tuileries Gardens. 
I remembered, crossing there, that this is the 
anniversary day of a fallen kingdom. 

The little Dauphin shuffled his feet through the 
fallen leaves as he went to the burial service of 
kingdoms, across the garden, in the old riding 
academy. 

I imagine his loving the sound of the dead 
leaves about his feet, as I used to love it when I 
was a cliild. 

The sense of autumn and the end of things is 
heavy upon Paris. 

All the news is good. It is just the sadness of 

autumn — 

Les sanglots longs 
des violons 
de I'automne. 

I went to meet Chantal in the Cour la Reine. 

We sat on the top of the river wall. No boats 
passed along the river, and few people passed 
under the slowly falling leaves. 

We were very alone with Paris. 

An old shabby man came by, reading an evening 
paper as he walked slowly. We asked him what 

27 



Journal of Small Things 

the news was. He stopped and stood by the wall 
with us and read good news to us. He said, "I 
fought through 70. It was just so in 70." 

Chantal said to me, "How dreadful to be old! 
The night of the first big victory, let's get some- 
body to take us out with the crowd on the boule- 
vards." 



Tuesday, August nth 

T7LIANE let me come to-day, for the first time 
-*--' since her boy went, on the Tuesday. She 
has changed so, one can scarcely believe it, in 
just these few days. She does not look young any 
more. How badly he would feel; he always 
loved his pretty little mother to look young. He 
loved it when people took her for his sister, and 
how delighted he was that time she went to see 
him when he was in barracks, and the captain 
was shocked. She is no more young and pretty 
and she does not care. 

Her eyes looked as if they never could cry 
again. She told me that the last night she had 
listened outside his door, and when she was quite 
sure he was asleep, she crept in, and groped for a 
chair at the foot of his bed, and sat there, not 

28 



Arras, August 16th 

seeing him, just knowing him near, all night 
long while he slept. She went quietly out of the 
room before he waked, when the light began to 
show the oblong of the windows — she did not 
want him to know that she had watched. She 
said he slept the whole night long, never stirring, 
and that she had known she must not cry, for fear 
of waking him. She thought something had hap- 
pened in that night to her throat and to her eyes, 
so that she could never have tears any more. 



Arras, August i6th 

¥ T was a heavy grey day, very still. People were 
•*• telling one another that all the news was 
good. The first German flag taken had been 
brought to Paris: one could go that day to the 
Ministry of War to see it. I wished I could have 
waited in Paris over a day to go to see it. I 
thought, it will be the first thing I do, to go to 
see it, when I come back next week. 

It was interesting to think that we went around 
by Arras because British troops were detraining 
at Amiens. 

It was all of it splendid, and one was proud 
and eager. 

29 



Journal of Small Things 

But the fields of France frightened me. They 
looked stricken. They lay under the soft, grey, 
close-pressing hours, so strangely empty. Every- 
where the fields lay empty. The fields were 
ripe with harvest. The wheat was burnt amber, 
and fallen by its o^vn heaviness. The wide 
swathes lay low along the ground, like the ground- 
swell of tired seas. The harvest was left, aban- 
doned. Sometimes one saw troops moving along 
the white roads. 

The towns had an odd stir of troops in the 
streets. 

At Arras, coming into the town, we saw that 
droves of cattle had been herded into a big 
enclosure, and that soldiers were guarding them. 
"VVe saw tents pitched in the fields. It was Sun- 
day. The women of Arras were out in their 
Sunday dresses. They seemed all to have come 
down to the railroad to watch the trains pass 
and to have brought all the children. There 
were only very old or very young men, 
except the soldiers. There were many 
soldiers. All their kepis were covered with 
blue. They were come with the others to watch 
the trains pass. 

In the deep cut beyond the station it seemed 
as if the whole town were come out to sit on the 
banks and just look. 

30 



London, September 

They were like children, I thought, not 
understanding, helpless, waiting for something 
that was going to ha"ppen. 



London, September 

THE night Ian went out was pretty bad. 
There were several other officers with 
him, and their wives and mothers and sisters and 
children all came to see them off. 

Every one knew quite well what it meant, and 
every one pretended not to know. 

I had come to feel, like the rest of them, that 
one has simply got to pretend. 

We all pretended as hard as we could that it 
was splendid. 

There was a woman on the platform who must 
have been crazy, I think. 

She did not belong to any one going out. She 
was one of those dreadful things you see in Lon- 
don, with a big hat heaped with feathers, and 
draggled tails of hair. I think she had a red dress. 

She came up to us under the windows of the 
train, and stood nodding her dreadful feathers 
and waving her dreadful hands and calling things 
out. 

She called out, "Oh, it's all very fine now, you 

3' 



Journal of Small Things 

laugh now — but you won't laugh long. You 
won't laugh out there. And who of you'll come 
back and laugh, my pretty boys, my gay boys?" 

Nobody dared take notice of her. If any one 
of us had taken notice of her, nobody could 
have borne it. There seemed to be no guard 
about to stop her, and not one of us dared admit 
that she was there. 

''My pretty boys, my gay boys," she kept 
calling out, ''you laugh now, my poor boys, but 
you won't laugh long." 

There were some little Frenchmen, cooks, I 
think, or waiters, from some smart hotel, going 
to Join the colours. They were in a third-class 
carriage next the carriage of the British officers. 

They heard the woman calling out like that. 
They were little pasty-faced cooks or waiters. 

But they began to sing. They began to sing 
the Marseillaise to drown the woman's voice out. 

They did it just for us, our men going out, there 
on the platform. 

Our men began to whistle it and hum it and 
stamp it. And we tried to. 

The crazy woman called out those terrible 
things, that were so true. 

And our men and the little Frenchmen sang 
and whistled and stamped. And so did we. 

And the train went out like that. 

32 



Paris, end of September 



Paris, end of September 

THAVE come home for six days. "I am here," 
■"■ I keep saying to myself, **I am here, at 
home, " as if I could not believe it. 

And those homeless people, that they begged 
for at all the stations where the train stopped 
on our way, those driven, herded people, stupid 
from horror they have passed through, helpless, 
in my home I keep imagining them. Where the 
train stopped in the dark at half-lit stations, 
people of the Red Cross came asking help, "Pour 
nos blesses, pour nos refugies." 

Somehow, in my little rooms, it is the refugees 
I see the more plainly. There is the young 
woman with the wheelbarrow, and the old 
woman, the grandmother, with the baby, the 
young man carrying the old man on his shoulders, 
the little brother and sister with the bundle. I 
see them toiling down the white road, turning 
back wild looks toward the smoke of their home. 
They had to leave the cow, but the old dog fol- 
lowed them. I see them in some strange place. 
They can go no farther. They do not care where 
they are, or what happens to them. They have 
looked upon the end of all that they had ever 
known. 

33 



Journal of Small Things 

Once, when the train stopped at a very small 
station, where one could smell the fields all close 
about and sweet, there was a woman's voice 
pleading; one heard her, as she came from door 
to door, along the train, in the dark, "For our 
homeless; we have thousands and thousands of 
homeless " Her voice trailed on in the dark. 

I was coming home. Until the boat lay against 
the quay I had not let myself believe that I was 
coming home. It was after sunset. The heaped- 
up town at the edge of the sea, with its old roofs 
and chimneys, was black, in a livid, cold, desolate 
sky, that made one think of the dead. The fields 
of France were dark as we came through them. 
The towns had few lights, one felt them to be in 
grief, and lonely. In each town there was the 
same pleading at the windows of the train, "Pour 
nos blesses, pour nos refugies." "We came in the 
small hours to Paris. 

The broken-doAvn fiacre dragged through 
scarcely lit streets that were all empty, and across 
the great Place, where nothing stirred, and over 
the bridge of the river, that was as lonely as a 
river of the wilderness. And then there was my 
home, where I must dream, all the nights, of 
homeless people, thousands and thousands of 
homeless people. 



34 



Paris, just before Christmas 



London, November 

TGO to the little Soho church of Our Lady of 
''■ France, to just stay there, not praying or 
anything. 

I go just to be with a people who are far 
from their country in her great need. 

Most of them are very humble people. There 
is a smell of poverty always in the little dark 
church. They are people to whom "home" 
can mean only some small poor place and things, 
a thatched cabin, a vineyard, a mansarde over a 
cobbled street. 

They kneel in the little dark church and sing — 

Sauvez, sauvez la France 
Au nom du Sacre Coeur — 

while alien feet tread hearts down into the stains 
and bruises of the roads between shattered poplar 
trees and thatched roofs burning. 

Paris, just before Christmas 

TTRY not to write. The only things worth 
-■- saying are the things I do not know how to 
say. 

Every morning people take up the day like a 
35 



Journal of Small Things 

burden. They carry its weight of dread along the 
hours, down the length of them to the end. 
Night comes at last, and they can lay the burden 
down, perhaps, for a little. 

When it is over they will look back and know 
how beautiful this winter was, and what high 
places they had sight of from the strange far 
journey ings of the days. 

When it is over they will know that it was good 
to work so hard, to give all, to be tired when night 
came. 



36 



PART II 
Small Town Far Off 



Small Town Far Off 

Monday, August 2nd, 19 15 

T X /"E thought we had to get away. But there is 
^ ^ no getting away. One feels it almost more 
in the country and in the little towns than in 
Paris, where life, somehow or other, keeps on. 

The country stands so empty. 

The men are gone. They are gone from the 
cornfields and vineyards and pastures. They are 
gone from thatched roofs and tiled roofs. From 
wide white poplar-bordered roads, and steep cob- 
bled streets, and hill paths that are like the beds 
of mountain torrents, from the wide way of the 
river, and from all the little ways of the streams. 

The women are left, and the old people, and the 
children. The oxen are left. The war has taken 
the horses and the mules. 

The great tawny oxen are beautiful, dragging 
the plough through the red fields, or the load of 
brushwood or green rushes along the Roman road. 

39 



Journal of Small Things 

The women trudge beside the oxen. 

The old people had thought that they were 
come to the time of resting, at the long end of it. 
They had thought to rest, at last, in their door- 
ways. But here they are, out in the fields of 
their sons and their sons' sons, at work, only 
vaguely understanding why. 

The Town 

The town is the colour of honey and burnt 
bread, its walls and gates and roofs, its castle 
and tour sarazine and the tall tower of the cathe- 
dral. 

The tower, a tall campanile, makes one think of 
Italy, as do the open stone loggie, and garlands 
and trellises of vines. 

Sometimes I think the town speaks to me in 
Italian. I try to understand, and then I know 
that it is not Italian, nor yet quite Latin, but the 
grand old tongue of the illumined pages of its 
princes' Mass books. And then again it speaks 
to me in the patois its shepherd saints spoke. 

The Saint 

The vines and fields come close about the tov.-n 
that for so long has counted its years by vintages ; 
the good year of the purple grapes, the poor year 
of the white grapes. 

40 



Monday, August 2nd, 1915 

The town has had its part in many wars, but 
that was long ago. 

It has a patron saint, a shepherd boj^ who 
saved it in three wars, miraculously. But it 
does not ask him for help in this war. He is too 
intimate and near. The town is too used to 
asking him that the spring rains may not wash 
the vines, that a frost may not come to hurt them, 
that a malady may not take the grapes. 

The mountains shadow the town, with shadows 
less blue than they themselves are, and scarcely 
more intangible than they are, as one looks up to 
them. 

The river passes quietly below the town, slowly 
along the wide, still valley. 

The River 

I know why the river goes so slowly, lingering as 
much as ever she can, and a little sadly. 

It is because just here she leaves behind her 
youth and wildness of great mountains, her mood 
of snows and rocks, cascade and woods and high 
rough pastures, cow-bells and mountain-horn. 
Going down into the classic countries, infinitely 
old, those deep, rich countries, she passes here, 
between the high clear lift and lilt and thrill of 
mountain music and the cadenced melody of 
Provence. 

41 



Journal of Small Things 

The old Estampe 

There is an old print in the library of the 
castle, that shows the town, her hill become a 
mighty mountain, the river a terrific flood, the 
castle guns emitting huge neat clouds of smoke 
upon the army of Savoy. You see the army of 
Savoy, in plumes and velvet cloaks, withdrawing 
upon prancing steeds, and the lords of the town 
issuing forth from the Koman gate witli bugles 
and banners. 

They were gorgeous, gallant little wars that 
the sons of the town rode out to in those days. 



The Depot d'Eclopes 

I 

' 1^ HE depot d'eclopes is just beyond the town, on 
-*■ the Roman road. The building was once 
the Convent of the Poor Claires. When the 
Sisters were sent away it was used as Communal 
Schools. There is a great plane tree outside the 
door in the yellow wall, and a bench in the shade. 
There is room for seven eclopes to sit crowded 
together on the bench. They bring out some 
chairs also. 

All day long, and every day, as many of the 
42 



The Depot d'Eclopes 

eclopes as can get about, and do not mind that 
the road see them, and can find space in the shade 
of the plane tree, sit there, and look up and down 
the sunshine and the dust. 

Some of them have one leg, and some of them 
have one ami. There is one of them who is 
packed into a short box on wheels. He sits up 
straight in the box, and he can run it about with 
his hands on the wheels. There is another in 
such a little cart, but that one has to lie on his 
back, and cannot manage the wheels himself. 
There is one who lies on a long stretcher, that they 
fix on two hurdles. There are two Avho are blind. 
The two blind men sit, and stare and stare. 

Looking to the right, from the depot d 'eclopes, 
you see the Koman gate of the town and remains 
of the ancient walls, and the old poor golden roof, 
heaped up about the square golden tower of the 
cathedral. The many ages have been so golden 
and slow upon the town that their sunshine has 
soaked into it. It is saturated with the sunshine 
of the ages and become quite golden. You 
imagine it in dark winter weather glowing with 
a gold of its own. To the left, from the gate of the 
depot d 'eclopes, the road leads between poplars 
and vineyards and cornfields to the mountains. 
The mountains stand very still, one against the 
other, one behind the other. They also are gol- 

43 



Journal of Small Things 

den, having retained ages and ages of sunsliine. 
They stand splendid, cut out of gold roughly, 
shadowed with purple and blue. 

I often go and stay with the eclopes at the gate, 
they like to have anybody come. It was a long 
time before I dared go in at the gate. 

Inside the gate there is a courtyard that was 
once the nuns' garden, with their well in the 
middle of it and their fruit trees trained along the 
walls. And there, there move about all day, or 
keep to the shadow, of first the east wall, then the 
west, those of the eclopes whom the road must not 
see. 

Some of them look up at you when you come in. 
But most of them turn away from you. 

The two blind men at the gate who stare and 
stare, they cannot see the golden town or the 
golden mountains. They cannot see the com- 
passion and the kindness that there is for them in 
the faces of all those who look upon them. 

But these men in the courtyard, however will 
they learn to bear, down all their lives, the looks 
that there will be for them in the most kind, com- 
passionate faces ? 

II 

There are not ever enough chairs under the 
plane tree. There are more eclopes than there 

44 



The Depot d' Eclopes 

are chairs. How they laugh! They think it 
very droll to see a man who has only his left leg 
and a man who has only his right leg sharing a 
chair. 

The men who have no legs say that that is not 
nearly so bad as having no arms. They say that 
the men with no arms are ashamed to be seen, 
like the men wounded in the face. They say 
that the men with no arms will never come out 
even to the gate. 

Ill 

They never will let you stand. It is a dreadful 
thing to do, to take one of their chairs. But they 
like to talk to a stranger. 

All of them, except the man whose spine has 
been hurt, love to talk. 

The man whose spine has been hurt lies all day, 
the days he can be brought out, on a stretcher, 
never stirring. He never speaks except to say 
one thing. He is very young. He looks as if 
he were made of wax. 

He keeps saying, ''How long the days are at 
this season!" 

He will ask, over and over again, "What time 
is it?" and say, ''Only eleven o'clock?" Or, 
"Only three o'clock?" 

And then always, "How long the days are at 
this season ! ' ' 

45 



Journal of Small Things 

IV 

They are taking out for a walk those of the 
eclopes who are fit for it. There must be nearly 
a hundred of them. In every possible sort of 
patched, discoloured uniform, here they come 
hopping and hobbling along. They have more 
crutches and canes than feet among the lot of 
them. 

One of the men who has no legs goes so fast 
on his wooden stump and his crutches that 
everybody stops to look, and all the eclopes 
laugh, and the people stopping to look, laugh, 
and he laughs more than any of them. 

If things are tragic enough, they are funny. I 
have come to laiow that, with the eclopes at the 
gate. And inside the gate, with those of the 
eclopes who keep back against the walls, I have 
come to know that the only safety of life is death. 

The Cathedral 



n^ HE Place de la Cathedrale is full of hot red 
"■- sunset, taken and held there, like wine in 
the chalice of old golden walls. The old golden 
walls of the houses that once were palaces lift 
up the shape of a cup to the wine of the sunset, a 
vessel of silence and slow time. 

46 



The Cathedral 

Now every night at sunset the bells of the 
Cathedral are ringing, and people are coming into 
the Place from the rue St. Real and the rue 
Croix d'Or and the tunnel street, under the first 
stories of the Palais du Mareehal, that is called the 
rue Petite Lanterne. 

They are coming to the Cathedral for the 
prayers and canticles for France. 

There are women and old people and children 
and soldiers, fine straight young chasseurs alpins 
from the garrison, like chamois hunters, with 
beret and mountain-horn, and wounded soldiers 
from the hospitals, and from the depot d'eclopes, 
with crutches and canes and white bandages. 

The swalloAvs are flying low back and forth 
across the cobbles of the Place and crying. 

Behind the tower of the Cathedral, the great 
purple mass of the mountains stands out against 
the sunset. The smell of the mountains, of vine- 
yards and cows and cool waters, comes down to 
the smells of the town's living in the Place. 

II 

Inside the church there are no lights, except of 
so much of sunset as comes in under the low 
arches, and of the red lamp, and of the candles, 
burning for Our Lady of Victories, and for the 
new Saint Jeanne d'Arc. Among the dusky 

47. 



Journal of Small Things 

jfigures, very still, in the church, you see white 
things. Sometimes it is the white cap of an old 
crone and sometimes it is a white bandage. 

Ill 

The church smells like a hospital. There is no 
more the smell of incense in the church, that 
used to linger there from office to office through 
the years. You wonder if really ever the church 
smelled of incense and wax candles. The smell 
of hospital has so come to belong there. 



Americans 

T T E did not seem so very ill. He had not that 
■*■ •*' look of being made of wax. And he talked 
all the time. Most of them die so silently. 

He lay in the bright ward and talked all of the 
time. 

He had enlisted in the Foreign Legion and 
fought since the beginning, and was wounded 
last week in the Argonne. 

He wanted me to sit beside him and listen. I 
hated the things he said. 

He said he was a fool, they all Avere fools, and 
they all knew it now. He said there was no 

48 



Americans 

glory. They had thought that war was glorious. 
And it was hideous; sardine tins and broken 
bottles, mud or dust, never a green thing left to 
live. There was no enemy. Just guns. When a 
man fell, nobody had hit him, only a gun. If he 
was dead, lucky for him. When they were 
wounded they made noises like animals. It killed 
you to pick them up. He said they "went sorter 
every which way" in your hands. If they feU 
between the trenches you couldn't get to them. 
It seemed as if they'd never die. Sometimes they 
made noises like wolves and sometimes like cats. 
That was the worst, the noises like cats. You 
never knew if it weren't cruel to throw them 
bread. If you threw them bread, they lived and 
lived. The trenches were full of rats. The rats 
came and ate your boots and straps and things 
while you slept. The smells were "something 
fierce. " " Gee, what fools we were, ' ' he said. 

He picked at the bedclothes and grinned at me 
and said, "Say, kid, ain't you homesick for back 
over across the Duck Pond ? ' ' 

I said, "Oh, no, no." 

I looked out of the window to the sky of France 
that never has failed me of dreams, and I said, 
"No, no, no." 

Oh, why did I? Why didn't I pretend for 
him that I was homesick too ? 

49 



Journal of Small Things 

An Altar 

TpROM the narrow deep old street you turn 
■*■ in under an arch to a vaulted passage that 
is ahvays dark and cold. It looks into a court 
that once was very proud. Now a wholesale 
wine merchant has heaped his tuns one upon 
another in one corner, and in another corner a 
carpenter has his saws and benches and great 
logs of mountain oak and pine. There are the 
smells of wine and fresh-cut wood together with 
the smell of stones and ages in the court. 

The houses about the court still keep something 
of their "grand air." They are of all the colours 
that time in the south gives to stones, saffron 
and amber and gold, as if the stone were soft 
for the sunshine to sink into. 

On the left of the court there is a wide high 
door under an escutcheon. 

The sound of the bronze knocker is very stately. 

The wine merchant has a blackbird that 
whistles all day in its osier cage, and the children 
of the carpenter are always laughing and calling, 
as they play with the fresh curled wood shavings. 

But everybody seems to stop and listen when 
you lift the bronze knocker. 

A lame man-servant comes to open the door. 
He fought through '70 with his master and was 

50 



An Altar 

wounded at Sedan, where his master was killed. 

There is a wide stone stairway, with a wrought- 
iron railing, and with walls discoloured where 
the tapestries have been taken away. 

The tapestries are gone also from the corridor, 
and from the room to which the man-servant 
opens the door. 

The old portraits are left in the walls of that 
room, and the exquisite wood-carving of the 
time of the Sun King, but the three or four 
chairs and the table on the right by the great 
carved hearth, are such as one would find at the 
Bazar of the Nouvelles Galeries. 

The room is empty, except for these chairs 
and the table, and the little altar. 

The long side of the room, opposite the door, 
has four tall windows that look across a garden, 
with untrimmed yew-trees and box edges, over 
green paths, tangles of grass and flowers, to what 
used to be conventual buildings and the nuns' 
orchard. 

The little altar is at the end of the room on 
the left as you come in, facing the windows. 

There is a statue of Notre Dame des Victoires 
and a statue of Saint Jeanne d'Arc, and there 
is the Cross between them. There are two 
seven-branched old bronze candlesticks. The 
altar is spread with **a fine white cloth." 

51 



Journal of Small Things 

On the floor before it is laid something covered 
with the flag of the Eepiiblic. 

I know what it is that the flag covers. 

She had showed it to me. 

One day, I don't know why, she took me 
there and lifted the flag, and showed me a heap 
of toys. 

She said, "They were babies when they died." 
''They died;" she said, "the two of them in one 
week together, of a fever. It was in the year 
that we called, till now, the 'Terrible Year.' It 
was in the month of the battle in which their 
father was killed." She said, "Look at the 
wooden soldiers of my babies, the Hussars and 
the Imperial Guards. How long ago! And this 
was a little model of the cannon of those days. 
Look at the bigger one's musket and the little 
one's trumpet and drum. And the little uniforms 
of the Empire I had made for them, and they 
were so proud of — My sons, to whom it 
was not given to die for France." 

Hospital 

/^ NE long side of the hospital looks from its 
^■^ rows of windows to vineyards and the 
mountains. The smell of burning brushwood 
comes in, to the smell of the hospital, 

52 



Hospital 

Through all the vineyards these days they are 
burning the refuse of the vines. The smoke 
stays among the vines, lingering heavily. The 
purple smoke and the red and purple wine colours 
of the vines, and the purple mists of the distances, 
gathered away into the purple shadows of the 
mountains, make one think at twilight of the 
music of a violin, or of a flute. 

The Number 18 is very bad. He does not 
know any one any more. He lies against a heap 
of cushions, his knees drawn up almost to his 
chin, his eyes wide open all the time, his hands 
picking at the covers. 

The boy in the next bed keeps saying, "If my 
mother were here, she would know what to do. 
If my mother were here, she would save him." 

There is a boy who wants some grapes. His 
whole body is shot to pieces. They do not dare 
give him even a sip of water. He keeps begging 
and begging for grapes. Very shortly the hillside 
under the windows will be heavy and purple 
with grapes. 

There is a boy who talks about riding over 
everything. He keeps saying, "We rode right 
over them, we rode right over them." 

There is another who keeps crying, "Oh, no, 
not that ! Oh, no, not that ! ' ' 

There is the petit pere, who is getting smaller 
53 



Journal of Small Things 

and smaller. When they are dying, they seem 
always to get smaller and smaller. He had a 
bullet through one lung, but it was out and he 
was getting well. Only, he caught cold. 

He is from the north. His wife and his two 
little girls are somewhere in the country from 
which no news comes. He has had no news of 
them since he left them and went away to war, 
on the second day. 

He used to talk of them all the time, and worry 
terribly. 

But now he cannot talk at all, and he does not 
worry any more. He smiles quite happily and 
has no more grief. 

When they do the dressings of Number 26 
he crams his handkerchief into his mouth so 
that he may not scream. He shivers and trembles 
and the tears roll down his cheeks, very big tears. 
But he never makes a sound. 

Number 15 is not a boy at all, but just a 
little sick thing. He is so very little in his bed. 
He is like a sparrow — the skeleton of a sparrow. 

I feed him crumbs of bread, and sips of water, 
as if he were a sparrow. 

How one loves a thing one has fed with a 
teaspoon. 

I do not like No. 30. I am always so afraid 
that I shall in some way show how I dislike him. 

54 



Hospital 

It is hateful of me, but I cannot like him. He 
screams at his dressings, and he is fat, and he 
sends out and buys cheeses and eats them. 

The little Zouave is better again. That is the 
most dreadful thing, that it is so long. He takes 
so long to die. The days when he is better are 
the most cruel days. 

To-day in the middle of the morning, he was 
beckoning to me with a feeble little thin brown 
hand. 

I went over and bent down, for he can only 
whisper. 

He said, "I said good morning to you when 
you first came in, and you did not know. ' ' 

Number 4 is not going to die. The shade of 
death is gone from his young face. 

He is going to lie for a long time on a rubber 
cushion that has a tube hanging down, quite 
long, like a tail. 

Every day, for a long time, at the dressings 
I shall have to pull back the sheets and blankets 
and take away the hoop, and see that thing that 
used to be a big fine man lying quite helpless and 
of so strange a shape upon the rubber cushion 
with the tail. 



55 



Journal of Small Things 

The Omelet 

npHE vine was red on the white old soft wall. 
■*• It was very beautiful. There were masses 
of purple asters under the red vine, against the 
wall. There was a bowl of purple asters on the 
table between the carafes of red and white vine. 

We had an omelet and bread and butter and 
raspberries, and water, very beautiful in the 
thick greenish glasses. 

Under the yellow boughs of the lime tree we 
could see the misty valley and the mountains. 

The table had a red-and- white cloth. 

The little old thin brown woman who served 
us wanted to talk all the time with us. She 
wanted to talk about the omelet; she had 
made it and was very proud of it. She wanted 
to talk about the war and to talk about her son. 

She said that there had been some horrible, 
strange mistake and that people thought that 
he was dead. She had had a paper from the 
Ministry of War telling her he was dead. It was 
very strange. She had had a letter also from the 
Aumonier, telling her he was dead. But, of course, 
she knew. 

She said he would come home, and be so sorry 
she had had such dreadful news, and so glad 
that she had not believed it. 

56 



Gentilhommiere 

They would laugh together. He had beautiful 
white teeth, she said, and his eyes screwed tight 
up when he laughed. 

She told us how she and he would laugh 
together. 



Gentilhommiere 

THE road, up through the vineyards and 
pastures and fields of maize and of buck- 
wheat, was like the bed of a mountain torrent, 
all tossed down, and grey and stony, between 
the poplars. In other years it had been a well 
enough kept little road, but in this year there 
was no one to care for it. And surely it had 
been a mountain torrent, in the spring's last 
melting of snows and in the heavy rains of the 
summer. Who was there left to mend it? Or 
who, indeed, to travel it? 

We climbed it slowly in the golden autumn 
afternoon. 

The poplar trees that bordered it were almost 
bare, the rains and winds of this most dreadful 
year had dismantled them already. They were 
tall slim candles, tipped with yellow flame. 

57. 



Journal of Small Things 

They were candles lit in sunshine, too early, 
before candle-light time. 

Autumn was come too soon. 

The vines had failed. And yet no one had 
ever seen the colour of the vines so beautiful. 

The road climbs up and up through the 
vinej'ards. 

The house stands on a ridge, among chestnut 
trees that were turned already golden and brown, 
high against the high wall of the mountains. 

The mountains were of the colours of the 
vintage, purple and topaz and red. 

The clouds made snow peaks high behind the 
mountains. 

The house has a heap of steep, old, uneven blue- 
tiled roofs. Its walls are as yellow as the corn. 
There is a long terrace before it, with a stone 
balustrade, worn and soft, and a pigeon tower 
at one end of the terrace, and the tower of a great 
dark yew tree at the other end. 

I thought what a withdrawn little place it was, 
held quite apart, like a thing treasured and feared 
for. 

The road passes under the pigeon-tower end 
of the terrace, and round into a courtyard that 
the farm and service houses close in on two sides. 

The courtyard smelled of clover and of cows. 
Multitudes of white pigeons fluttered about the 

58 



Gentilhommiere 

old thatched roofs of the grange, where the hay- 
was stored in the gable, and corn hung drying 
in golden festoons, and the dust of the threshing 
floor was deeply fragrant. The wine vats smelled 
of grapes. And odours of lavender and wild 
thyme came close down from the mountain side. 

The entrance door stood open, across the grass 
and cobbles of the court, to whosoever might 
trouble to go in. 

There was a great chestnut tree on either side of 
the door, and the ground about the door was 
strewn with brown burrs and golden leaves. 

A little old peasant woman, who must surely 
have been the Nounou long ago, came to the 
door, in sabots and the white stiff winged cap of 
the country. 

She said that" Madame had gone down to the 
black wheat fields. 

The waxed, black, shining stairs came straight 
down into the red-tiled hall. 

Across the hall there was a fine carved and 
painted room, that lay all along the length of 
the terrace. That room was closed because of 
the war. *' Madame had it closed," explained 
the little old nurse, ''since the day when Monsieur 
Xaxa went." 

In the dining-room there was a big table 
pushed back to the wall, with many chairs 

59 



Journal of Small Things 

crowded out of the way against it. The old 
nurse said, "We do not use this room, now that 
Monsieur Xaxa is gone. ' ' 

She would show us the kitchen with its red- 
brick tiles, and dark, great beams, and earthen jars 
and coppers, and its old stone hearth, like an 
altar. 

She said, "Nothing is kept as beautifully as it 
should be. Madame and I are quite alone. ' ' 

She would have us go up the shining stairs. 
*'You must see the room of Monsieur I'Abbe," she 
said, "it is all ready for him. He comes to-night. 
We have been for days and days getting his 
room and all the house, prepared for him." 

There were purple and white asters in bowls 
and vases. The floor of the room shone like a 
golden floor. The old green shadowy mirror 
reflected the room as if it were a dream room, 
into which one might pass, just stepping through 
the tarnished lovely frame. The bed was covered 
with a very fine ancient green-and-white striped 
brocade. On the bed, under the crucifix and 
the Holy Water basin and the spray of box, 
there were laid out Monsieur I'Abbe's soutane 
and his soft hat with the tassel. His em- 
broidered worsted slippers stood on the golden 
floor beside the bed. 

"He is Madame 's eldest son," said the old 
60 



Chateau 

nurse, "and he is a great and wonderful saint. 
A great and wonderful saint." 

*'But," she said, as we went out of his room 
to the stairs, "it was always Monsieur Xaxa that 
Madame loved best." 

As we went down the stairs she added, **He 
was a wild boy, but we adored him. He was 
always wild, not like Monsieur I'Abbe. But 
how we adored him ! ' ' 

She said, ''I thought Madame would die the 
day he went away. But yet it is he who is dead, 
since seven months, and Madame and I, we live." 

Chateau 

nr^HE gates stand open. Some one has broken 
**" open the gates. Or perhaps no one had 
troubled to close them. 

The porter's lodge, under the limes, is empty. 

The avenue of ancient, stately lime trees that 
leads to the chateau, is overgrown, in this one 
year, deep with grass and moss. The trees, that 
have not been trimmed, shade it too darkly. The 
leaves of the lime-trees are falling. In another 
year it would seem strange if the leaves fell so, 
before the end of August; but in this year no 
death seems strange. The dead leaves lie deep 
in the avenue. 

6i 



Journal of Small Things 

At the end of the avenue the chnteau stands, 
helplessly. Through long times and much his- 
tory, its towers commanded the valley and 
the great road of the river. Its name rang in 
high councils, and its banners knew the winds of 
many wars. 

Again its sons went out to battle. They were 
three of them. They went, just more than a year 
ago, three gay young chasseurs alpins. They 
are all three of them dead, on the field of honour. 

The little aged orange trees are all dead in 
their green tubs in the courtyard. The ivy 
has grown across the great barred entrance door. 
The lantern over the door is full of swallows' 
nests. 

The old Monsieur and the old Madame are gone 
away. How could they have lived on in the 
house that was not to be for their sons? 

We asked many people in the village, but no 
one knew where they had gone. 



Shopping 

I 

TN the library of the Octagon I found some little 
■■- etchings of these old streets and courtyards 
and allees murees, steep roofs and balconies 

62, 



Shopping 

and open loggie, carved windows and doorways, 
corners and turnings, done beautifully by some- 
one who had surely understood them. He had 
known how the smell of old wood and stone 
strikes out from certain shadows and stabs you 
in the heart; and the sudden sharp loneliness 
you feel because of dead leaves driven against the 
tower stairs. 

The librarian said, "He was indeed an artist." 

The librarian was very old. He wore a little 
black skull cap and a grey muffler about his 
throat. He was bent quite over, and could see 
what I had taken only when he held the things 
close to his eyes. His hands were twisted like 
old brown fagots, and they trembled and fumbled 
as he held the etchings, one after the other, close 
to his eyes. 

"We were very proud of him," said the 
librarian, "he was of this town. He would have 
given the town fame throughout the world. His 
right arm is shot away. And he is so young." 

He kept on repeating that while he tied up my 
etchings. 

"He is so young," kept saying the librarian, 
who is so old. 

II 

As I was leaving the antiquity shop in the 
rue Basse du Chateau, standing a minute at the 

63 



Journal of Small Things 

door with the antiquary's pretty young wife 
and the two fat babies, there came along the 
street four fantassins, two of them limping, one 
with his arm in a sling, carrying a funeral 
wreath between them. 

It was made of zinc palms and laurels, and the 
tricolour was laid across it. 

We stood, not saying anything. 

The fantassins passed, going up toward the 
ramparts of the Porte du Midi and the cemetery, 
carrying their comrade's wreath and the flag. 

The antiquary's little young wife was crying. 

She said, ''I have a letter to-day from my 
husband. I have a letter every ten days. He 
also is a fantassin. He is in the Argonne." She 
threw back her head that the tears might stay 
back in her eyes, and said, ''He was very well 
when he wrote. He wrote that he was very well, 
and that I was not to be afraid." 

Ill 

I went to scold the old woman of the fruit shop 
because she never remembers my apricots. 

The fruit shop in the rue des Ramparts is a 
low stone doorway, hung with scarlet peppers and 
dried golden corn and yellow gourds, and onions 
that are of opal and amethyst and pearl; and 
heaped about with cabbages and lettuce and 

64 



Mountains 

tomatoes and the few fruits of the season, black- 
berries and plums and apricots. 

The old woman sits in the doorway. She wears 
the white winged cap and a blue apron and a 
brown silk fringed shawl and a big gold cross on 
a gold chain. Her husband was killed in '70. 
She has no son. Her daughter's three big sons 
Avere very kind to her. They are all three of 
them chasseurs alpins. From one there has been 
no news since eleven months ago. 

She was sitting perfectly still in her place, her 
hands lying together, hard-worked and tired, on 
her blue apron. She was looking straight ahead 
of her and did not see me at all. 

I stood and looked at her, and did not speak 
and saw far-off things, and turned and went 
away. 



Mountains 



npHE inn, up in the rough stony town of 

■*- the high mountains, was forlorn enough. 

There were some dogs and chickens about the 

door of it, in the wet street. 

The woman who came to the door of the inn 

65 



Journal of Small Things 

was one of those thin, dark pale, quiet women 
about whom there is always something sym- 
pathetic and sad. She said, she feared the inn 
could do us little honour; we must forgive, 
because of the war. 

The stone hall was narrow and cold, the stairs 
went straight up from the farther end of it, and 
two doors opened from it on either side of it. 

The woman took our wraps, and put them 
down on a table that there was by the entrance 
door. 

Before the door to the right, down by the stairs, 
there was a small, fat, blonde baby standing, a 
little round-headed boy baby, in a black blouse, 
knocking on the door and crying and calling 
"Georgeot." He did not turn to look at us at 
all, but went on always knocldng and crying. 

The woman said, "You see, we never expect 
any one now, but if Monsieur and Madame will 
be indulgent — this is the dining-room, Madame,'* 
she opened one of the doors on the left, and went 
ahead of us into the dark room, and groped to 
the window to throw back the blinds. 

"We went to one of the bare tables, and she 
arranged it for us, not talking to us any more. 
And after a while fetched us potatoes and cheese, 
and sour bread and red wine which tasted of the 
roots and stems of vines. 

66 



Mountains 

Whenever she left the door a little open behind 
her, we could hear the baby in the hall sobbing 
and calling for "Georgeot." We asked her, 
"But the poor little soul, what is the matter 
that he calls like that?" 

She told us it was his father he was calling. 
She said he had been hearing her call his father 
"Georgeot." His father had been home for 
six days' leave, and was gone back just this morn- 
ing. "You understand," she said, "my husband 
had not seen his baby in eleven months, and he 
had him every minute in his arms ; and since he is 
gone the baby will not go away from his door, or 
stop calling for him." 

She did not seem to want to talk any more 
about it, and we pretended to find our lunch 
most excellent. 

When we went out into the hall again she had 
picked the baby up, and was standing with him 
in her arms, there by his father's door. She 
patted his yellow head do\^ai against her shoulder, 
but he still went on crying for "Georgeot." 

It was raining hard out in the grey street. 

In a shop under a vaulting, that the crook of 
a shepherd Saint had blessed through hundreds 
of years, I bought a queer sort of woolly beast 
for the baby. 

But the baby did not care for it at all. 
67 



Journal of Small Things 

II 

Going' on yet higher up into the mountains, 
we met a dreary little funeral, coming down under 
umbrellas. The coffin, under a black cloth, was 
pushed along in a two-wheeled cart by a woman 
and a very old man. Some women and two or 
three old people followed, and some children and 
dogs. 

It was not the funeral of a soldier, only of some 
one uselessly dead. 

Ill 

Rain, sunshine, wet black rock, great blue 
and black and purple clouds, clear azure spaces, 
snows, lifted drifted crests of snow, like waves 
arrested — all this as we went up, and up, with a 
rainbow like a bridge across the valley we were 
leaving behind us. 

Up and up and up, into the young joy of the 
mountains, young as at the beginning of the 
world, joyous above all things. What do they 
care, the great mountains? They stand quite 
still, and all things pass. They lift their heads, 
and do not even know. 

A baby cried because its father was gone away 
to war. Its mother did not cry at all. 

A stranger came by and cried, not because of 
those especial people, but because of the world. 

68 



Mountains 

A little funeral straggled down the hill in the 
rain. 

None of it mattered. 

I thought, we went up high above all griefs. 

Some children and a woman, from a hut up in 
the snow, came to beg of us. 

I thought, for what did they need to beg, they, 
who had the everlasting snows? I thought, hov/ 
absurd to beg for bread to live, in a place where 
death would be so pure and clear, would ring out 
so joyously. I thought, how nice it is that all 
the roads of life lead up to death. And that 
death, however come to, is so high a thing. 

It was terribly cold. The snow was over us 
and under us, as the clouds were. 
IV 

In the round basin circled with snows, the 
ancient hospice — that is no more a hospice, from 
which its old possessors have been driven away — 
stands white, beside the white road, in the close- 
cropped pasture. The sheep and tawny rough 
cattle were the only things that stirred. The 
smoke of the hospice chimneys stayed quite 
motionless in the golden air. 

The air rang like a golden bell. 

The music of the cow-bells was no more dis- 
tinct a music than that of just the golden ringing 
of the air. 

69 



Journal of Small Things 

They lighted a fire in the stove of the long white 
refectory, and we had tea and bread and butter 
and honey beside it. 

There were no guests in the hospice. The little 
white stone rooms, that used to be the monks' 
cells, had floors of red-brick tiles and thick walls, 
and each cell had one deep narrow window. 

The woman who built our fires, and fetched our 
tea, and showed us to our little white stone rooms, 
was not old, but looked very old and sad. She had 
a red knitted shawl and big gold earrings, and big 
brown dumb eyes. 

We went out into the music of the sunset, every 
mountain peak was singing. It was utterly still, 
except for the sheep-bells and cow-bells. The 
silence was a great music, joyous and grave. 

V 

I am sitting up in bed, writing by the light 
of two candles; it is a golden light, in the pure 
white moonlight that fills the cell. 

The slit of a window opposite the bed is wide 
open, and the moonlight floods in. 

I am so cold, I have put on my big travelling 
coat. 

The moonlit air tastes of mountain tops. The 
stillness is immense in the small room. All the 
silences of the world are in the room. 

70 



Mountains 

I cannot see the moon, nor the snow peaks; 
only the sky of sheer moonlight, and a dark dim 
mountain, looming. 

I am so glad to be awake and cold. 

VI 

While I was writing, something happened. An 
ugly sound broke the spell. Some one was com- 
ing to the hospice. There was the sound of a 
motor-bicycle, from a long way off, coming 
through the stillness. There was the calling of its 
horn and then it was at the door. 

I heard the door open, and a cry of delight ; and 
a man's young voice, joyous, high-keyed, intense, 
and a woman's voice, laughing and sobbing. 

VII 

I saw the sun come up out of the snow, I saw 
all the marvellous things that there are between 
darkness and dawn. 

I had made myself stay awake the whole night 
through, to not lose one minute of the mountains. 
The mountains were mine, from sunset through 
the dusk and the dark and the moonlight, to the 
dark again, and through that other so different 
dusk that is before the dawn, to the sun's great 
silent rising, and the full glory of the day. 

71 



Journal of Small Things 



VIII 

It was the son of the woman of the gold ear- 
rings and the red shawl, who had come home in 
the night, unexpected, for six days' leave. 

He was out in the morning pastures, a tall lean 
mountain boy, with gleaming white teeth, and 
brown eyes like his mother's, but laughing, and 
with absurd dimples in his brown young face. 

His mother v/as out with him in the dawn, the 
red shawl over her head, keeping close beside him 
as he went swinging across the pastures, her short 
step almost running by his long step. 



The Little Maitre d'Hotel 

OUR little worried grey butler is gone. 
His class has been called out, the class of 
Quatre-vingt-douze. 

It appears he was only forty-three. 
I had thought he was sixty at least. It must 
be because he has been anxious all his life that 
he seems so old. 

He was terribly worried and anxious when he 
talked to me, the night before he went, about 
the old father and mother he must leave. He 
would be going probably only somewhere back 

72 



The Garage 

of the line'5 to guard a bridge or a railway, but for 
him it meant — who knows what darkly, helplessly 
imagined things? He talked a great deal in a 
high-pitched voice — standing there, very white 
in his proper livery — of bayonet attacks, of the 
coal he had managed to get in for the old people, 
of dying for France, and of his mother's rheuma- 
tism, and of the cow they had had to sell. 



The Garage 

' I ^HERE are twelve convalescents installed 
*■■ after a fashion in the garage half-way down 
the field path. They are so nearly well that 
they can make up their beds and sweep out their 
rooms and wash at the pump and go down to 
eat at the canteen of the hospital Sainte Barbe. 
They go to the Clinique there every second or 
third or fourth day. An orderly comes up from 
there once in a while with clean linen for them. 
And that is all they need be troubled about. They 
are quite comfortable and very forlorn. 

They spend their days hanging out of the 
windows of the loft over the garage or sitting 
about the big board table of the space under- 
neath, where the motors used to be kept. 

Most of them are men from cities who do not 
73 



Journal of Small Things 

know what to do with the country, and the three 
or four who are country boys know so well what 
to do with vines and fields, that the vines and 
fields they may not labour, so close about 
them here, only worry them. They are the men 
who get most cross and quarrelsome over the 
games of cards at the board table. 

They all quarrel more or less. Sometimes I 
wonder, how can men who are so splendid, so 
simply, steadily, dumbly splendid, who have 
been through so much, seen death so close, and 
life so close, quarrel like this over nothing at all. 
But most times I understand. 

The crickets trill all the hot noons in the grass, 
and the droning of the bees sounds very hot. 
Like clouds of white butterflies drift over the 
path, make little drifting butterfly shadows on 
the path. There is a most wonderful smell of 
clover in the heat. Down under the fields there 
are heaped together the crowded old rust-red 
and burnt umber and golden roofs of the town. 
And all away beyond there is the valley, opened 
out, long road and river, to high, far distances of 
mountains and snows. 

I go and sit with my friends about the big 
board table, in the place where the motors used 
to be kept. I play cards with my friends, the 
twelve convalescents. I play badly, for I hate 

74 



The Garage 

cards, but they like to have a guest. They try 
to arrange the game so that I may win. They 
want me to win; they think that I will enjoy it 
better. If they knew how bored I am they 
would be dreadfully upset. I wish I loved cards 
and could play well, to please them. 

Towards evening they are certain to be cross 
with one another. 

One after the other they will soon be going 
back to the Front, all of them. There is not one 
of them who will go unwillingly. They have been 
there, they know what it is, but there is not 
one who will grumble when he goes back, or 
fail when he faces tliat again. Every one of them, 
when he goes back, will say the same thing. 
"Of course I must go back, all the comrades 
are there." *'Tous les copains sont la-bas." 
But in the meantime they quarrel. 

From the doors of the garage, wide, one sees 
the sunset among the mountains. The bats 
flit across and the owls call. The dusk 
comes, velvet-thick and soft, with smells of 
fields and vineyards and' of the town's hearth 
fires, and with the myriad voices of cigale and 
frog and sleepy bird, and with the small life 
noises of the town. Gathering up, and folding 
in, the night comes. 

There is electric light in the garage that my 
75 



Journal of Small Things 

friends are very proud of indeed. A huge naked 
bulb dangles from a cord over the table where 
we sit playing cards. 



Francine 

^T^ HE son of Francine is home on leave. 
■*■ Francine comes every day to help in the 
kitchen. She was scrubbing the Idtchen's grey 
stone flags when her son came. 

He came swinging up the path between the 
wheat and poppies and cornflowers. He came 
up the terrace steps, in his leggings and his 
beret, a fine young diable bleu. 

Francine came, running, wiping her red hands 
in her apron, suddenly beautiful and very proud. 

Railway Station, The Days of the 
25th 

^ I ^HE trains of wounded arrive almost always 
-■" at dawn, the late autumn dawn. 

The lamps of the station are still burning, but 
grow pale. 

Beyond the open platform, across the tracks, 
you can see that dawn has come to the sky, 
behind the mountains. 

76 



Railway Station, The Days of the 25th 

There is a star in the midst of the dawn, 
Hesper, star of both the twilights, very big and 
bright and near, like a lamp. 

It is very cold. 

In the pale light of the dawn and the pale light 
of the station lamps they wait for the train of 
wounded to come in. 

The Red Cross has a cantine at the station in 
what used to be the buffet. But these men will 
be past need of coffee and soup. 

The cart of the buffet, that used to be pushed 
along the trains with breakfasts under the carriage 
windows, is heaped now, in these days, with 
very strange things. There is need of these 
things, always. There is this, and that, that 
cannot wait. 

The doctors from the Lycee Prince Victor, now 
the big military hospital, are there by the chariot. 
They stand waiting and talking together. They 
turn up their coat collars and sink their hands 
in their pockets and stamp their feet in the cold 
of the dawn. 

The orderlies wait with their stretchers, back 
against the wall, under the gay posters of places 
where people used to go to be amused. 

The Red Cross nurses keep back in the cantine, 
where it is warmer. 

The train is late. It has been from three to 

17 



Journal of Small Things 

six hours late each one of these dreadful mornings. 

Everything has been ready since long, long 
ago, in the deepest dark of the night. 

If only there are enough blankets. 

The train is terribly, terribly late. 

New Ones 

TT was for this that they evacuated last week 
-'' all who could possibly be moved, to fill 
the wards v/ith other broken things. They 
gathered up all the broken things that had lain 
here so long, and sent them awaj'". And now 
the wards are full of other broken things. 

The old ones had grown accustomed to the 
rooms. They had suffered and been unhappy 
in these rooms, and when they had to go away 
they did not want to go. They had nothing left 
but the place and people of their suffering, and 
they found, when they had to go, that thej'' loved 
the place and the people they had grown so used 
to. They seemed to be afraid to go away. To 
all the weariness was added this new weariness. 

And noAV the wards are full of new ones. 

The new ones lie very still. 



78 



Another Winter, Thursday, October 7th 

Deaths 

IT is quite simple. 
If it can be that the priest comes, it is 
very well. All that the priest does is beautiful. 
The feet and hands, the eyes, the lips have 
sinned, and the touch of forgiveness upon them 
is exquisite. It is exquisite, that last entering 
in of the Divine Body to the body that is dying. 
But if for any reason no priest comes, if no one 
cares or troubles to ask for him, or if there is no 
time, God is most surely there and under- 
stands. And one is comforted to find that there 
is no need to fear for them, as they die. 

They die so quietly. I am glad to know how 
quiet a thing it is to die. 

There was only one who was not quiet. 

They bound ice about his head, and then he 
did not shriek and fling himself about any more, 
but lay quite quietly until he died. 

Another Winter, Thursday, 
October 7th 

"fXT'HEN the rain had gone over, in the late 

* ^ afternoon, and the clouds were lifted 

and drifted a little, we saw that there was snow 

79 



Journal of Small Things 

on all the near mountains, through the pines, upon 
the pastures. 

The cold wet street was full of excited swallows. 
Here was the cold. The cold was come too soon. 
They never yet had gone south so early. 

Dear me, dear me — where would they stop 
the night? 

Up under all the old shaggy rusty eaves, that 
reach out over the narrow streets, hundreds and 
hundreds of swallows were crowding each other 
in and out of sheltered places, such a fluttering 
and twittering. Under thatch and tiles, along 
the ledges of fine proud old stone windows, and 
of wine-red wooden balconies, they pushed and 
crowded each other, and in and out of the brown 
clayey nests that summer had abandoned. 

People in the streets stopped to watch, laughing 
a little. 

People in the cold, wet streets stopped to 
watch the swallows, women and old people and 
children. 

"They have seen the snow on the mountains," 
said the people to one another, laughing a little. 

And then always, every one said, each to the 
other, the same thing. 

The one thought of all of them together, "An- 
other winter." 



80 



PART III 
Paris 



Monday, October nth 

TWAS thinking all night in the train — how 
"*■ can I look at them, how can I speak to them 
in their depth of grief? I was thinking — ^when 
the old woman comes to open the door, what can 
I say to her? "When the old man comes to take 
my big dressing-case and my little dressing-case, 
and my strap of books, how can I face him? 
Their son is dead. 

The son of our concierge is dead. "Mort au 
Champ d'Honneur." 

They were so proud of him. They did so 
worship him. He was such a clever boy that he 
had gone beyond anything they had ever imagined. 
If you just in passing saw him with them, you 
thought he did not belong to them at all. You 
thought he was a gentleman who was waiting a 
minute for some reason, there in the loge. But 
you would have known, if you had had time for 
it, how he worshipped them and was proud of 
them; they had worked so hard, his little fat 

83 



Journal of Small Things 

slow sweet mother in the neat black dress, and 
his little stumpy cross father, who made it a 
point to come to the door in his shirt sleeves. 

In those wonderful first days the son of our 
concierge went away. 

It was on Tuesday, the second day, in the 
afternoon, about five o'clock. He had to be at 
the Gare d'Austerlitz at seven, and getting there 
was difficult. 

I think that day was the most cruel and most 
wonderful of all. I shall always remember how 
hot it was, and how the leaves were fallen in the 
garden. 

They told me how it seemed as if he really could 
not go. He kept starting, and coming back; and 
starting, and coming back. He hugged his little 
fat old mother, in her neat black dress; and 
hugged her, and had to turn back to hug her again. 
His father was going with him, to help carry the 
bundles. He was in his shirt sleeves. He kept 
blowing and blowing his nose. His mother had 
said she would not come to the door. But she 
did come to the door. She had said she would 
not stand to watch him go. But she did, crying 
and smiling and waving to him. He got to the 
street corner four different times. And three of 
the times he came back, to hug her just once 
again. 

84 



Same Day, 11th of October 

And he is killed. 

There will be the little stumpy father in his 
shirt sleeves, and the little, so very respectable 
mother, fat and slow. 

How can I look at them? What can I say to 
them? 

They must open the door for us, and pay the 
taxi, and carry up our things. 

How can I tell them that I kneel before their 
sorrow as if it were a throne ? 



Same day, nth of October 

'TpHE first thing to do was to go up to my 
-*■ neighbour's queer big kitchen — up on the 
roofs — because there were eleven little soldiers 
at supper, to whom, though I have not been here 
to see them until now, I must say good-bye. It 
is the last day of their leave, they will be off 
to-morrow. 

Always my permissionnaires eat with my neigh- 
bour 's permissionnaires together in the kitchen 
on the roof. They are always men from the 
invaded countries, who have nowhere to go for 
their leave. 

Before, they have always been men who had 
85 



Journal of Small Things 

been in hospitals and were sent to us for their 
sick-leave; but these are little young boys, the 
Classe Seize, just from their depots, with a few 
days of leave before their beginning of battle. 
The oldest of them is nineteen. 

You go up to the kitchen by a little twisted 
stairway, like the stairway of a tower. On three 
sides of the kitchen there are charming blue 
mansarde roofs and black crooked chimney-pots, 
and on the fourth side there are the tree-tops of 
an old garden. When the leaves are fallen, 
one can look down from the kitchen terrace, 
through the branches of the trees, and see all the 
design of the garden, paths and lawns, statues 
and massifs and the big central basin, as in 
the ground plan, drawn so long ago. 

To-night the fallen leaves in the sunset made 
the garden a place all of amber. One looked 
down into an amber glow. And all the roofs and 
tree-tops of the quarter, and the two tall towers 
of Sainte Clotilde, seemed translucent; for the 
gold of the sunset to shine through. 

The kitchen has a floor of polished red brick 
tiles and shines with beautiful copper pots. 

Eleven little soldiers were just finishing their 
coffee at the table with the red cloth. 

What babies they are. And how alike they 
look, all of them. It is absurd. Eleven round 

86 



Tuesday, October 12th 

close-cropped heads; eleven round rosy peasant 
faces; eleven pairs of round clear eager question- 
ing eyes; eleven straight young figures, with 
stiff gestures, in bleu d 'horizon. 

Classe Seize, eighteen years, nineteen years, 
twenty years. It has become the age to die. 



Tuesday, October 12th 
The Chocolates 

TWENT to get some chocolates at a little shop 
-■■ near the hospital. 

The woman of the shop counted me out the 
heap of chocolates one by one in their silver paper. 

She was a thin pale little woman with the sort 
of blue eyes that are always sad. Her eyes looked 
as if they had cried and cried, in her worn faded 
little face. She had the little woollen cape of 
the quarter around her shoulders and her pale 
hair was rather grey. 

"While she was counting the chocolates the 
postman came. He brought a big square yellow 
envelope addressed in that special writing, surely, 
of a little soldier, and with the franchise militaire. 

I thought — It is a letter from her son. 

She took it, thanking the postman, and put it 
87 



Journal of Small Things 

down on the table and went on counting out the 
chocolates. 

"But, Madame," I said, "are you not going 
to read your letter?" 

She turned and I saw that she was crying. 

"It is from my son," she said. 

She began putting the chocolates in handfuls 
into a paper bag. 

She said, "This morning I had a notice from 
the Mairie that he is killed." 



The Goldfish and the Watch 

ON a table in the window there was an opal- 
blue bowl full of water, with purple iris 
floating in it, and little bright goldfish, four of 
them, glinting through it. 

Some one had given it that day to the children. 

Eene, the eldest boy, stood by the table watch- 
ing the goldfish, not thinking of his father at all. 

There were minutes in the days when he did 
not think of his father. 

But afterwards it was always the same thing. 

He never told any one, because he was seven 
years old and very shy. No one would have 
understood. And it was dreadful to him when 
people did not understand. 

88 



The Goldfish and the Watch 

It was about his father's watch. 
On one thick, hot, velvet-black night, his father 
had come into his room and waked him with a 
sudden switching on of the light, and said, ''Hop 
up, old chap, you've got to go and tell your 
mother to stop crying." 

''But, father, why? Will she not stop 
when you tell her ? ' ' 

"It is because of me that she cries. I have 
got to go away. ' ' 

"Oh, father, why have you got to go away?" 

"Because there is war, Eene. I have got to 
go and fight. And you have got to stay and 
look after your mother. Quick now; go to her 
and say, 'I'm here.' " 

"But, father " 

"Here's my watch for you, old chap, and the 
chain, you see. Mind you take care of it. Don't 
let it run down. I want to find it right to the 
minute when I come back. And I want to find 
your mother well, not crying — and you, my brave 
little man, taking care of everything for me." 

"Like the watch, father?" 

"Yes, like the watch." 

So he had to take simply terrible care of his 
father's watch. 

If it ran down, if he let it run down, what in 
the world would not happen? 

89 



Journal of Small Things 

The battles might be lost to France. His 
mother might die. And then whatever could he 
say to his father ? 

In the days he used to hurry home from every- 
thing, to the watch. And in the nights he used 
to sit up in bed to listen for its ticking. He 
would stay awake for hours in the nights, afraid 
it might stop and he not know. Often in the 
nights he would cry from the tiredness of having 
to keep awake and listen. But in the days he 
would forget the watch, sometimes, for a little. 

To-day he was happy because of the goldfish. 



Hospital, Friday, October 15th 

TUST these days the people of several of the 
•^ men have been coming from far to see them. 

Way off, in some little town of Brittany or 
the Beam, or Provence, there had arrived word 
that the soldier this or that had been wounded 
thus or so, and was at the hospital. Upon 
months and months of waiting in dreadful, 
helpless ignorance, the shock had come as a 
relief almost. 

But how strange and terrible a thing the 
journey was to people who could understand so 
little what they must do. Where to go, what to 

90 



Hospital, Sunday, October 17th 

do. Perhaps they were people who had never 
ventured beyond the town where the diligence 
stopped, who never had taken a train. They did 
not know what the Champagne meant. They 
did not know where Paris was. The departure 
was a tremendous thing. A tearing up of roots 
and cutting with a knife. Then the journey, 
confused and terrifying. Then the great city, 
and the great hospital. 

There is a moment when it seems as if it were 
a stranger, the boy lying there, in the bed that 
is one of such a long row of beds. His people 
stand, a little dazed, down by the door. The 
long ward, the two long rows of beds against its 
walls, the stretcher-beds down the middle of it; 
and all those boys who lie so still — ^how strange it 
seems to them! And their boy, who does not 
wave his hand or shout to them, who scarcely 
lifts his head — his smile has changed, has come 
to be quite a different smile. 



Hospital, Sunday, October 17th 
Number 24 

'JUMPER TWENTY-FOUR is dying. I am 

■*■ ^ very glad. It is much better for him 

91 



Journal of Small Things 

that he should die. But it takes so long. It is 
terrible that it should take so long to die. 

He calls me, "Ma petite dame." 

"My little lady, what time is it?" 

Strange, how they ask that, so many of them, 
when they are dying. 

There is a clock on the wall opposite his bed. 
They tell me that for three weeks he has not been 
able to see it. He says the room is full of mist. 

He says, "My little lady, can you see the 
clock?" 

I always answer, "No, I cannot see the clock.*' 

He says, "You cannot see it because of the 
mist." 

And I say, "I cannot see it, because of the 
mist." 



La Mort d'un Civil 

THE old Monsieur is dying. He has been 
dying for days and days and days. He 
is dying at a time when death is very cheap. 
Every one is dying. The youth of the whole 
world is being taken away. What does it 
matter at all that an old man, who has no part 
in the war, is taken away? AVho, except his 
elderly maiden daughter, has time to care? 

92 



La Mort d'un Civil 

Cousine Gertrude is very kind. She comes 
every evening, after the hospital, and stays for 
two hours, sitting in the room, knitting grey 
socks, while his daughter rests a little. 

Her boy, Francois, aged twenty-one, went out 
on the first day. He has been all the time in the 
trenches, except for one leave of six days. He 
is in the trenches now, in Champagne. 

The man dying here has everything that is 
possible done for him. He has the best that can 
be had of doctors and nurses. 

These boys in the trenches one dares not 
think of how it may be with them. 

His daughter is very brave. She never cries. 
She remembers that Cousine Gertrude would 
like a cup of tea. 

She knows that the son of Cousine Gertrude is 
young and beautiful. 

Death, in these days, is young and beautiful. 

And her father is old. His death is only a 
dreary thing. 

She understands that even people as good as 
Cousine Gertrude must grudge it its place in 
the world. 



93 



Journal of Small Things 

Canal 

TN all the mornings and nights, going to the 
•*■ hospital and coming back from it, I love 
my canals. The canals of Venice, of Holland, 
rivers and great waterfalls and fountains and 
the waterways of kings' gardens, that people 
travel far to find beautiful, are beautiful for all 
the world. But my canal is beautiful for just 
me. 

Its narrow stone-bound curve is hung over by 
uncared-for plane-trees, and by ragged, jagged, 
rickety, crooked houses, that lilt and tilt and lean 
together and over, dingy and dark. The rough 
cobbled quays have small traffic now, the litter 
of the canal's old life is gone from them. They 
are quiet, with no more rough calling and shout- 
ing of carters, and turmoil of hoofs and wheels. 
Sometimes, but rarely, a slow heavy flat canal 
boat is towed and poled along, through the locks 
and under the high black bridges. But most 
times the slow tawny water flows unbroken. 

The tawny leaves of the plane-trees are fallen, 
and lie on the cobbles and in the water. The 
stems and branches of the plane-trees have black 
reflections in the water, with the reflections of 
crazy roofs and chimney-pots, and of tatters 
^nd rags of colour from windows and walls. 

94 



Hospital, Tuesday, October 19th 

Sometimes in the mornings, these October 
mornings of sardius and topaz and sapphire, I 
find myself singing as I walk along the edge of 
my canal. It is so difficult not to be happy. 



Hospital 

"|\ T Y hospital was, all of it, built in the time 
■^ -^ that means lovely things of red-brick and 
grey stone and blue gables. The courtyards 
are paved with huge ancient cobbles, and there 
are grass plots that are green and wet, and big 
trees and bushes whose leaves are falling slowly 
in blue stillness. 

There are more than two thousand sick in 
my hospital, six hundred wounded of the war, 
one hundred and fifty of them in our service. 

I love to write "my" hospital and "our" 
service. 



Madame Marthe 
Hospital, Tuesday, October i9tb 

npHINGS had been very bad all day. When 

-*- night came it seemed dreadful to go away 

and leave so much suffering. I thought of the 

95 



Journal of Small Things 

nif^ht, with fever and that special helplessness 
which belongs to the night. 

I would have been so glad to stay the night 
out with the ward. 

I said that to Madame Marthe, as we left 
together. 

She said, ''But why?" 

She always has a cold and wears a little blue 
woollen cape over her blouse and apron. When 
she leaves the hospital she pins up the two black 
ribbon streamers of her cap of the tri-couleurs 
and wraps her arms around in the blue woollen 
cape. She looks very small and cold and poor. 

"Why?" she asked. 

The hospital is her world and she is thankful 
for every minute she can get away from it. 

I leave my world to come to it. 

I was ashamed to say to her, "It is for my 
own comfort I want to stay, to make myself 
imagine that I really am needed." 



Hospital 
Things They Say 

I ERHAPS in other, different kinds of hospitals, 
hospitals of the little good sisters, or of ladies 
96 



Hospital: Things They Say 

of the Red Cross, hospitals of beautiful influences, 
one could not love the men so much. In hospitals 
where the beautiful things of the Faith, prayers 
and tenderness and peace, are all around about 
the pain and death; and there are words for 
praise of courage and sacrifice, and words for 
sympathy and for hope, and words for high 
ideals; where it is as poets and painters and all 
people have always imagined it, perhaps one 
could not get quite this understanding of things 
that are not said, or come in so rough and 
vivid a way, upon unimagined things. 

One loves to think of the wounded soldier 
with the nun beside him, and of the lady of the 
great world tending the peasant hero. One 
loves to hear of the men saying, "C'est pour la 
France." 

Here there are no pictures I would dare call 
beautiful. It is crude and raw. And things 
are not said. When there is not too much 
suffering, it is rough. And when the sufCering 
is great, it is all very dumb. 

Here there is no one who knows how to word 
things. The men do not know, and the nurses 
do not know how to tell them. They all only 
just go on. 

The nurses are poor women, of the "people. 
They come, each one of them, from her own small 

97 



Journal of Small Ihings 

desperate struggle for life, each from her own 
crushing deadening small miseries and cares, 
without any help of dream and vision, callously 
— one, just looking on, might think — to their 
work in the hospital. To the great magnificent 
suffering, each one of them comes dulled and 
hardened by some small sordid helpless suffering 
of her own. Everything has alwaj^'s been a 
struggle, and this is just part of it. They work 
on every day, and all day long, with no one to 
put into words for them, devotion and sacrifice. 
No one here speaks of those things, or thinks of 
them, or even knows. 

When I see my little Madame Marthe, my chief, 
so very tired, I say to her, "You work so hard." 
And she always says, shrugging her thin round 
shoulders, "Qu'est-ce que vous voulez, i' faut 
b'en. Nous sommes la pour Qa." If I dared 
to tell the patronne, who is intelligent to bitter- 
ness, that I admired this she did or that, she 
would say, "What of it, we are paid for that." 

Odd how often it is the same thing that people 
say. 

When I ask of a man with the Croix de Guerre 
what he did to win it, he always says, "Je n'ai 
fait que comme les autres." 

A man going back does not say to us here that 
he is glad to have his life to offer again for his 

98 



Hospital: Things They Say 

country. But he says that thing which makes 
me catch my breath with pride in him. "Je 
veux b'en. Tons les copains sont la." 

They go off like that, to those places of death 
that they know already, wherein they have seen 
things we dare not imagine, and all they say 
about it is that all the copains are there. 

There are not many of my ward who go back, 
ours are the very badly wounded, the men who 
are out of it. 

The men have done all that they could do. 
Every one of them did all that he could do, and 
kept on doing it as long as he could. And when 
he could do no more, why then he was out of it, 
and it was for others to take up and go on with. 
He himself was done with it. He would rather 
not talk about it. It had been so bad that he 
does not want to talk about it. He does not 
want to think about it any more. 

He would rather talk about things that used 
to happen "dans le pays," about the vines or 
the corn, or the fishing boat with oars or with 
sails, and "la vieille" and "les petiots." 

"It is pretty bad?" I say, perhaps, to this 
one or that one, when I see how he is suffer- 
ing. 

I have never heard one of them say, "C'est 
pour la France. ' ' 

99 



Journal of Small Things 

But what they always, always say, all of them, 
is a thing I think very beautiful. 

"You suffer much, my child?" 

"Pas trop, Madame." 

Always it is, "Not too much." 

But sometimes it is too much, and they 
cannot bear it. 

And when I look at the bed that used to be his, 
I think of him lying there trying to smile and 
to say that his suffering was not too much. 

And the new man in the bed says those same 
words, as if it were a little formula always an 
answer to the question I cannot help asking. 

**You suffer much?" 

"Not too much, Madame." 

Sometimes they say, "Ca va aller mieux." 

" Ca ne va pas, mon petit ? ' ' 

"Ca va aller mieux." 

There is only one thing that is like the things 
one reads of. It is that the men, when they are 
very, very bad, always, always call for their 
mothers. 

I remember reading that somewhere, and 
thinking it was just something somebody had 
thought pretty to write. 

But it is one of the most true and simple and 
beautiful things that there can be in the world. 

It is strange too. When they suffer desperately, 
IQQ 



Hospital: Things They Say 

they keep saying, "My mother, my poor mother," 
as if it were she who suffered. They seem to be 
grieving for her, not for themselves. 

When they are frightened they call for her. 
Some of them are frightened of taking chloro- 
form. They have fought and not been afraid, 
they would not be afraid to die, but chloro- 
form is different. 

Joseph opens the double doors of the ward and 
pushes the stretcher cart in and calls the number 
this or that. 

He is all ready and waiting. 

Joseph lifts him from the bed to the cart. I 
double a pillow under his head and wrap the 
blanket over, and follow. 

The doors at the other side of the hall are 
closed, and I run ahead to open them, and shut 
them behind again after the cart. 

If I can make an excuse I go down the corridor 
and wait also at the door of the operating room. 
I know the men hate to wait there alone. Some- 
times there is very long to wait. And Joseph 
has to go to do other things. 

Sometimes the door of the operating room is 
ajar, and one can see in a little, and that is 
horrible. People go in and out, the doctors, and 
Madame Laure, fetching and carrying things. 
The stretcher of the man who has been taken 

lOI 



Journal of Small Things 

in is left pulled back against the wall, by that 
of the man who is waiting his turn. I stand 
very close to my cart and pat the blankets. 

The men like to have one wait with them. 
There is a thing many of them say. It is a dull 
thing, and touching, as sometimes dull things are. 
They will say, over and over, "If you were 
not here, I should be alone. If you vv^ere not here, 
I should be alone. ' ' 

But when the doctors come, with the chloro- 
form, it is only of his mother the man thinks. 
He says, *'0h, maman! Oh, maman!" and 
keeps all the time saying it till he sleeps. 

The adjutant, the new Number 12, says that 
you can hear them calling maman all the time 
when they lie wounded between the trenches, 
wounded and one cannot get to them to pick 
them up. He says it is the last word they call 
before they are still. 

The Patronne 

TTAKE off my cloak and blue veil in the 
-*• patronne 'a room. 

The patronne is usually sitting at her desk. 
Sometimes she says good morning to me, and 
sometimes she doesn 't. 

She used to be fille de salle in this hospital, she 
1 02 



The Patronne 

used to clean these stairs and corridors; then 
she rose to be infirmiere in the ward where I 
work now, and then panseuse. She is a huge 
gaunt raw-boned sorrel-coloured woman, who 
looks like a war-horse. She is so alive and quick 
that you feel her personality stronger than 
anything in the hospital, than anything, you 
think, anywhere. I have seen her seem stronger 
than death — driving death away. 

When Number 17 was so very ill, I think it 
was she who drove death away from his bed. 
She worked and swore, and worked and swore. 
It was hideous. I laugh when I remember. 
Afterwards I found her outside in the corridor, 
sitting on the bench. He was going to get 
well. I cried; and she swore at me till I 
laughed. 

Big red blotches come out on her arms when 
she is excited, and get purple when she is tired. 
If you visit the hospital, you do not know what 
to think of her. But if you work there you 
admire her, and are proud when she speaks 
to you kindly. It is an illumined day if 
by chance she says to you, "Bon jour, ma 
crotte." 



103 



Journal of Small Things 

Madame Marthe Again 

T DON'T know at all how it happens that a 
-■■ little white mouse of a woman of the people, 
who has worked and worked all her life, and 
never been cared for by anybody, should have 
beautiful hands. But Madame Marthe has beau- 
tiful hands. Her hands are small and quick and 
absolutely sure. They tremble when things are 
bad, but in spite of that they are certain and sure. 
They never make a mistake. And they are not 
afraid of anything. 

Sometimes my hands are afraid to touch things, 
and then I am ashamed. Sometimes I pretend 
not to see things that are fallen on the floor, and 
when she picks them up, I am so ashamed. 

If my two hands were poisoned so that they 
had to be cut off, it would not make any difference. 
But what would the ward do if anything happened 
to the hands of Madame Marthe? 



The Ward— All Souls' Day 

^T^HERE are twenty-eight beds against the 

"*• walls of the ward and ten stretcher-beds 

down the middle of its long clear bright length. 

Between the beds there is no room to push the 

104 



The Ward, All Souls' Day 

dressing cart about, it stands close up against 
the apparatus of dressings. 

There are some things that make stains on 
the whiteness of the ward. When I am away 
from it, I see those things standing out against 
the whiteness. 

There is the blue of the sublime in the glass 
tank of the dressing cart, and there is the green 
of the liqueur de Labaraque in the big jar on the 
apparatus. 

Sometimes there will be the light blue of a 
kepi or the dark blue of a beret against the wall, 
hung on the knob at the top of a bed, or the red 
of a Zouave's cap. 

There are the black squares of the slates over 
beds. I can see, as if from any distance, the 
words scrawled in chalk on the slates: "Amp. de 
la cuisse gauche et de la jambe droite au dessoua 
du genou." "Amp. du bras droit a I'epaule," and 
three "Xs" for the hemorrhages. "Plaie pene- 
trante poumon gauche. Op. 20 IX." "Brulures 
gaz enflamme visage poitrine deux bras. " " Eclat 
d'obus dans le ventre." "11 eclats d'obus cote 
gauche." And on and on like that, up one side 
of the ward and down the other. 

Besides the black slates there are the placards, 
pale yellow, printed and written over that some- 
thing may be known about the man on the bed. 



Journal of Small Things 

And there are the pale yellow temperature 
charts, with the dreadful lines of fever that 
zigzag up and down. 

There is exactly room between the beds for 
the night-tables; the chairs have been put all out 
into the corridors and heaped up against the wall 
opposite the lift. Madame Bayle is annoyed 
because they are in the way when the linen comes 
up. They are to be sent to the attics as soon as 
any one has time to see to it. But now no one 
has time. 



Hospital, Thursday, November nth 

'' I ^HE sparrows were all talking together in 
-^ the trees of the great central court of the 
hospital. 

I met Madame Bayle as usual in the first court. 
We almost always meet there, as I arrive and 
she is crossing to the store-house on the other side 
of the entrance. Usually we stop and stand a 
minute, listening to the conversation of the 
sparrows. 

Madame Bayle is the chief of the linen-room 

of our pavilion. She is a dreadful fat shining 

shuffling person, who hates me because I wear 

white shoes. Also because once I made her unlock 

1 06 



Hospital, Thursday, November 11th 

the linen-room for me to take out some things I 
thought were mine, and the things were not 
mine, and she was angry with me. She is 
always trying to get me into trouble to pay me 
back. But we both love the birds in the court- 
yard. When we meet in the courts these days 
we say to one another, "Voila nos pauvres 
petits pierrots!" and are friends for a moment. 

This morning I ran past. I was afraid if I 
stopped she might give me news of my ward. 

The buildings of the second court have not 
been militarised. It is the pavilion of the 
defective children. None of the children were 
out in the court this morning. The lights in their 
rooms were still burning, it was so dark a morn- 
ing; I could see some of the children making 
up the rows of little cots, and some of them 
clearing away the bowls and pitchers from the 
long table. There are some who always sit with 
their hands in their laps and their heads hanging. 
They have dreadful little faces. Some of the 
children can do lessons a little, and some of them 
seem quite bright, and play always the same game, 
hands around in a ring, in a corner of the refectory. 

The third court is for the wounded of our 
service. The recreation-room and various offices 
and kitchens open on to it, and the windows 
of the two storeys of wards look over it. 
107 



Journal of Small Things 

The lift was down, and Cordier called to me; 
but I ran past, and up the two flights of stairs, 
away from him as from Madame Bayle. 

Cordier had been given charge of the lift. He 
is one of the wounded in the face. It is not his 
eyes. It is the lower part of his face. They are 
beginning to take off some of the bandages. He 
did not mind so much while the bandages quite 
hid it. But now he minds dreadfully. This 
morning I hated dreadfully the sounds he made 
calling to me. They say he will never be able 
to speak distinctly again. I was afraid he would 
be hurt because I ran by. But I would have 
known from his eyes if what I had dreaded had 
happened in my ward. 

I took off my things in the patronne's bureau, 
and went across the passage to the door of the 
ward where I help every day with the surgical 
dressings. 

It is always strange to open the door of the 
ward when one first comes on. So much may 
have happened in the night. 

I stood outside the door. The door has 
glass panes that are washed over with white 
paint so one cannot see through. There are 
places where the paint has not held at the 
edges, and one can stoop and look in. 

I could not see the bed of Number 29, from 
io8 



Hospital, Thursday, November 11th 

there, but I would know from the look of the 
men in the ward. 

As I stooped, the patronne came out from the 
chief 's bureau. 

I heard her step and turned. 

She said, "He is very bad. If they amputate 
he will probably die of the shock. It will have 
to be the left leg too, at the thigh. It is you 
who must tell him. If they do not do it he will 
die of poisoning certainly," 

She stamped her foot at me and said, "Now 
don't look like that. You've got to tell him. 
He will take it better from you. ' ' The blotches of 
her arms were very purple. She said, "They are 
going to do it this morning. Go and tell him." 
Then she went back into the chief 's bureau. 

I went into the ward. I still could not see the 
Number 29 because of the hoop, like a little 
tent, that keeps the weight of the blankets from 
his legs. 

Madame Marthe, the panseuse, was not in the 
ward. The infirmiere, Madame Alice, was clean- 
ing the night-tables down by the other door. 

Every one called, "Bonjour, Madame; bonjour, 
Madame ! ' ' 

' ' Bonjour, les embusqu^s ! ' ' 

That is our great joke, that they are all em- 
busques. 

109 



Journal of Small Things 

I went across to Number 29 and looked at him 
over the hoop. 

He was lying with his ej^es wide open. They 
are like the eyes of deer and oxen. He is a very 
big man, very ugly, with an old scar over half 
of his face. Such an ugly, funny face; the 
shadow of death has no right to be upon such a 
ridiculous face. His face was made for making 
people laugh. He always kept the whole ward 
laughing. He used to make me laugh in the midst 
of his horrible pansements. No matter what he 
suffered, he never used to make a sound. I almost 
cannot bear it when they suffer silently. If they 
scream, I really don't care much. He used to 
try to wink at me to make me laugh. 

I knew this about him, that his people are wood- 
cutters in the mountains between the valleys of 
the Maurienne and the Tarentaise. I do not 
know why he went away to strange new countries. 
He must be thirty-five years old. In wildernesses 
he heard of the war three months after it began. 
He was wounded seven months ago, and was 
sent from hospital to hospital, getting always 
worse. He is not the sort of creature to be in a 
hospital. He looks absurd in a bed. He used 
to tell me of throwing one's blanket over a heap 
of pine boughs and sweet fern. He had much 
fever, and he would tell me about the clear, 
no 



Hospital, Thursday, November 11th 

cool, perfect water of a certain forest spring. 

I thought, standing there, how he would be 
wanting to drag himself into some hole of rocks 
and great tree-trunks, where no one saw. 

The clock was striking eight. They would not 
begin to operate before ten. He would have to 
think of it for two hours, lying there. He looked 
at me very steadily. I thought, "It is I who 
must tell him, it is I who must tell him." He 
tried to wink at me, and then he shut his eyes. 
I thought, "I will wait a little." 

I went to the apparatus in the middle of the ward 
and began to get things ready for the panseuse. 

I tried to talk to the men in the beds near, the 
9, Barbet, whose fever had gone down nicely; 
and 10, the pepere, who has had his right hand 
amputated; and 6 and 7 opposite, who are both 
young and gay and getting well fast. But I could 
not talk. 

He is only one of thousands and thousands. 
In the hospitals, in the dreadful fields, along the 
roads, they are dying. 

Those of the men who could sit up and use 
their hands were folding compresses. 

Twenty-one started a song and some of t*he 
others took it up. They sing softly, many of 
them have very nice voices. 



Ill 



Journal of Small Things 

Pere Mathurin 

N'a pas de chaussons! 
II en aura; 

II n'en aura pas. 
Roulons-le, Pere Mathurin, 

Roulons-le 
Jusqu'a demain ! 

I got everything ready on the dressing-table. I 
kept all the time looking at the clock. Every few 
minutes I passed where I could see Number 
29. He lay always with his eyes shut. Madame 
Alice had finished her cleaning and had gone to 
tidy up. Madame Marthe would come back 
and we would have to begin the dressings, 

Dans une brouette 

Pere Mathurin 
Roulons-le 

Jusqu'a demain. 

When T was unrolling the big cotton, I felt sure, 
suddenly, that 29 was waiting for me. It was 
odd, for I could not see him round the hoop ; I went 
to him. 

His eyes were open and he tried to say some- 
thing. His mouth was black with fever. 
I leaned down close. 
I was thinking, ' ' I 've got to tell him. ' ' 
But he said, "Don't worry, I know." 
I stood there and I did not say anything. I 
did not even look at him. I looked quite away 

112 



Hospital, Thursday, November 11th 

out of tlie windows to the tree-tops and the blue 
roofs and the wet close sky. 

He lay perfectly still, and I just stood there. 

The men went on singing — 

Pere Mathurin, 

II en aura, 
II n'en aura pas 

Madame Marthe had come in and was going 
about her work. She did not call me. It 
was nice of her not to call me. 

She is quick and very clever and nervous and 
bad-tempered. She is rather horrid for me 
usually, but to-day she has been so nice that I 
shall always remember. 

She went on with the dressings. I stood quite 
silently by the bed of 29. 

After a while the chief came in with the patronne 
and all the doctors. They came to Number 29 
Madame Marthe came, and I left her with them. 
They talked for a few minutes with her and then 
went out. 

I helped her get him ready, and then Joseph 
came with the stretcher. 

I went with him down the corridor to wait at 
the door of the operating room. They give the 
chloroform usually at the door. It seemed 
dreadfully long. 

113 



Journal of Small Things 

I said, "You don't mind my waiting with you, 
do you? I'd like to." 

It was such a silly thing to say that he tried to 
laugh at me. 

I thought they would give him the chloroform 
here at the door of the operating room and that 
I would run when he was once under. But they 
threw open the doors, and wheeled the stretcher 
cart in, and called to me to help lift him to 
the table. And then to help with this, with that, 
quickly. And I stayed and' helped through it all. 
They thought he was going to die there on the 
table. Afterwards I realized how horrible it 
had been. When we got back to the ward, the 
patronne was there with Madame Marthe. 

The patronne is a wonderful nurse. If any one 
can get a man through it, she can. She is dread- 
ful. She screams from one end of the ward to 
the other and stamps her foot, and uses hideous 
words. But she can storm a man back into life. 
And suddenly all the rage will be a coaxing, and 
you know that she cares about it. ''J'ai cela 
dans la peau," she says. 

She shouted the "cinq lettres" at me, "What 
are you staring at? Get on with your work. 
He's through that, and he's not going to die." 



114 



Sunday, December 5th 

Number 14 
Sunday, December 5th 

'T^HB mother of little 14, Louis, has come 
-'- to see him. 

When I came into the ward this morning, I 
was frightened to see that there were people 
about the bed of little Louis. 

I don't know why we always call him little 
Louis, for he is a great long boy as he lies there 
in his bed; he must have stood splendidly tall 
and strong before. 

But it was only that Madame Marthe and 
Madame Alice were standing there, talking with 
a tall fine woman, who wore the black shawl and 
small black ribbon cap of the country of Aries. 
The shawl and the cap gave to the mother of 
little Louis that special dignity the peasant 
costume always gives, oddly touching in the 
lonely city and in this huge strange house of 
grief. 

She was sitting quietly by the bed of little 
Louis in the corner, talking to him and smiling, 
and talking to the nurses. 

Little Louis was smiling with big tears rolling 
down his cheeks. 

Madame Alice had the pail of dirty water on 
115 



Journal of Small Things 

the floor beside her and stood leaning on the handle 
of her mop. She is a big well-built woman, 
handsome and sullen. She is sullen even when 
she does kind things. You would not believe 
• that she was kind. She had her skirt pinned 
up ta her knees and wore the huge wooden sabots 
she always puts on when she scrubs the floors. 

Madame Marthe stood cleaning her nails with 
the pansement scissors. She had not yet put 
on her cap with the black streamers and the 
ribbon of three colours. She has great coils of 
pale hair. 

Once she said to me, "I suppose you wear a 
hat in the street?" I said, "Usually." And 
she said, ' ' I would not wear a hat if I went to see 
a king." 

She and Madame Alice and the mother of little 
Louis were all laughing together over our especial 
joke, that Louis will be very wicked as soon as he 
is a little better, and will make us great trouble 
in the ward. 

Louis' father died two months ago, and Louis 
does not know. He is so ill that he cannot be 
allowed to know. His mother had to answer all 
his questions about home, and explain that his 
father had not been able to come because it was 
lambing time. She had to smile, and make 
it seem that everything was going well in the 

ii6 



Monday, December 6th 

house that little Louis would never see again. 
She had to make it seem as if the patronne had 
not told her that little Louis was dying. 

He would have liked to have had her left alone 
with him. But she was grateful when one or 
another of us found a minute to come and stand 
there and smile also. 



Monday, December 6th 

TN the cold, rainy, windy early morning there 
■*• was a regiment of infantry, with all its camp- 
ing things, battle things, marching across the 
Place de la Bastille, going out. 

Long blue coat and blue-covered kepi, blanket 
rolled up in a big wheel, knapsack and cartridge- 
belt, flask and drinking-cup, bayonet and gun. 

And each man had a bit of mimosa or a few 
violets or a little tight hard winter rosebud 
buttoned into his coat, or stuck in his kepi, or in 
the muzzle of his gun. 

I think most of one smart young officer, 
who had three roses in his hand. They were 
not the sad little roses that the south sends to 
the winter streets of Paris, but great fuU hot- 
house crimson roses. 

117 



Journal of Small Things 

He carried his roses in his left hand, held a 
little before him, that nothing might touch them, 
stiffly, and looked straight ahead of him as he 
marched. 

A woman, standing beside me to watch them 
go, said to me, *'They are so young." 

She had a grey shawl over her head. 

The band passed. I do not know what it was 
playing. 

The woman and I stood together to watch those 
boys go away. 



Madame Alice 
Thursday, December 9th 

npHESE last days Madame Alice has been even 
-■- more sullen than usual. She arrives in the 
morning, they tell me — she arrives at six and I 
am never there to see — with a long face, and 
will say good day to nobody, and grumbles be- 
cause somebody's handkerchief, or somebody's 
bag of rafia grasses, or somebody's package of 
letters, had fallen from his night-table to litter 
her floor. She grumbles about "pigs," and bangs 
things. 

118 



Thursday, December 9th 

When I arrive I find her still grumbling and 
banging. 

This morning she was washing the face of the 
new 25. She washed his poor face very gently, 
no hands in the world could have been kinder 
or more careful than hers, or more delicate of 
touch, though they are big and red, but she was 
grumbling all the time. 

I said, ''Good morning," and she hunched 
one shoulder. 

Madame Marthe came in and said that I had 
better go and fetch my boiled water before some- 
body else emptied the boiler. 

When I was coming back with it from the office, 
Madame Alice was standing by the vtdndow at 
the turn of the passage. She had put her pail 
down on the floor, with 25 's soap and things 
thrown down beside it. She stood with one 
arm against the window-pane and her face buried 
in the crook of her elbow. 

I said, "Oh, Madame Alice, are you ill, Madame 
Alice?" 

She hunched her shoulder. I put my big 
pitcher down by her pail on the floor, and patted 
her shoulder and said, "Please, oh, please." 

She said, not turning or raising her head, 
** They've taken him to the children's hospital 
— Jeanjean, my little boy, you know; he has 
119 



Journal of Small Things 

been very ill all tlie week. A neighbour 
said, five days ago, she would take him to the 
Clinique, there is no hour when I can get away 
from here to take him. It was the neighbour 
who looked after him the day they sent him home 
from school because he was sick. She is very 
good, but she has not much time. She has got 
her work. She did not know how ill he was. I 
told her, the first day, to take him to the Clinique, 
but that day she had no time. She did not tell 
me. She told me that at the Clinique they said 
it was nothing. She told me thati every day. 
For five days she did not take him. I only saw 
him in the nights, you knoxv. Oh, it is horrible 
when you can only see them at night." 

She stopped a minute and was sobbing, but 
without making any noise. She rubbed the 
tears out of her eyes against the back of her hand, 
and went on. It was odd to hear her talk so 
much, like that — she whom I only knew as sullen 
and silent. 

*'It is nearly eight at night when I ^et home," 
said she, "and I have to leave soon after five in 
the morning. I was up with him all the nights, 
and I was so frightened all the days. Oh, these 
days here!" 

She stood always with her back turned, and 
I could only stand there, patting her shoulder. 

120 



Saturday, December 11th 

It was queer how such big sobs made no noise at 

all. 

She said, "The neighbour got frightened yester- 
day, and took him to the Clinique, and they said 
it was spinal-meningitis, and sent him then, at 
once, to the children's hospital. When I got 
home he was gone. It was night, they would not 
have let me see him at the hospital. This morn- 
ing I had to come here. But I shall get off at 
noon and go to him for an hour." 

She shook herself and jerked away from me. 

"Now do you see?" she said, "now do you 

see?" 

And without saying what it was she meant she 
took up her pail, and 25 's little bundle of things, 
and went on along the corridor. 



Saturday, December nth 

TO-DAY I have been seeing the little old cure 
of Jadis-sur-Marne. I found out, after all 
this time, where he was; and went and sat 
with him for an hour, in a pleasant sunny room 
of the house where they take care of him. He 
did not know me at first, but afterwards he seemed 
quite pleased. I want to tell this story of him. 

121 



Journal of Small Things 

One Sunday, months and months and ages 
and ages and ages ago, Monsieur le Cure of Jadis- 
sur-Marne, began his discourse in a wrath right- 
eous indeed. It was the Sunday that nobody 
knew was to be the last Sunday of peace. 

"My dear brethren," began Monsieur le Cure, 
in his most angry voice. He snapped the words 
out, ''Mes chers freres," as if each word were a 
little sharp stone shot out of a sling to sting the 
upturned faces of his listeners. "My dear 
brethren," he began in righteous wrath, and 
stopped short. 

He stood in a bar of dust and sun motes, up in 
the old black carved pulpit, against the grey 
stone pillar. Then he was a round, jolly, rosy, busy 
old little cure, who got into a temper only reluc- 
tantly, after much goading. 

His church was old and beautiful and quite 
large. There were twenty-one people in it: ten 
in the chateau chapel, opposite the pulpit, Madame 
la Marquise and Mademoiselle and two guests 
in the great red-velvet chairs, and six of the 
servants in the benches behind them; old Ernes- 
tine, the cure's bonne, in her round white cap, 
erect, determined to stop awake; another white 
cap or two, here and there, and Pere Pate's black 
skull-cap ; two secularized sisters from the Ecole 
Libre, awkward in their black hats and jackets; 

122 



Saturday, December 11th 

three little wriggling girls whom they had managed 
to capture and retain on the bench between them ; 
some small boys down by the door; and Made- 
Ion, the twelve-year-old daughter of the chateau 
gardener, who forsook the chateau pew that she 
might sit nearer to Monsieur le Cure. 

Madelon sat twisted round in her chair to look 
straight up at him and adore, her hands in their 
Sunday gloves clasped intensely upon her blue- 
print lap. 

It was cool in the church after the last day's 
rain, and dark, except where bars of sunshine 
and dancing sun motes struck across, and where 
the altar candles were little stars. 

One heard the chickens cackling in the cure's 
garden, and the locusts shrilling close at the 
windows in the acacia trees of the cemetery, 
and the children calling and laughing in the street. 

"My dear brothers," began Monsieur le Cure, 
looking down into the round blue eyes of Madelon. 

He clutched the edge of the pulpit in both 
hands and leaned forward. It was indeed 
tremendously that he was going to scold. He 
had a right to scold. All night, in his little brown 
room, under the snores of old Ernestine, he had 
been working himself up to the pitch for it. 

Next Sunday was the Fete of the Patronage. 
The Grand Vicaire was to come, all the way from 
123 



Journal of Small Things 

Meaux. Madame la Marquise was to present 
a banner. 

The children romped in the street. The women 
put on hats and went and stood and gossiped in 
the market-place. The men went fishing; the 
boys went fishing. 

Every Sunday it was the same thing. 

In a high temper, Monsieur le Cure began, 
"My dear brothers," and stopped short. 

He let go of the pulpit edge and stood straight 
and looked over the heads of the twenty-one of 
them. All the light there was in the deep old 
church seemed to be upon his face. 

When he looked down at his people, it was 
with a lovely shining of kindliness. It was as if, 
suddenly, he realized how he loved them. He 
loved them too much to scold. 

**My dear brothers," he said. All the words 
became little kind caresses. They were small 
humble words, poor little words, simple, like 
his listeners. They seemed to have the touch 
of many little wings across the faces lifted 
up, or to fall like showers of blossom petals. 

One day, only so little a time afterwards, 
Monsieur le Cure stood among a heap of 
charred things and broken, blackened stones. 

This is what used to be the pillar of the pulpit, 
and under all that, at the end there, must be 

124 



Saturday, December 11th 

buried the altar, with the cross and the candles 
that used to be stars. There are things that are 
burned, all black and charred, and things that 
are twisted. The cure cannot make out what 
they are. He had not known that there was 
iron in the church. Queer iron things are twisted 
and tortured. The new bright window he had 
thought so beautiful is all broken, the reds and 
blues and yellows sparkle among the stones. 

There are men's boots. What are men's boots 
doing here, sticking up straight out of the ruins 
of altars? 

They are the boots of the dead men. Those 
things among the stones are dead men. You 
go to see what the boots are doing here, and you 
find that the blue-and-red heaps are dead men. 

How they sink into the earth! They are trying 
to get back into the earth, whence they came. 
They came from it and are trying to get back, as 
fast as they can, into it. 

This was once a church. And once upon a 
time, ages and ages ago, or only some days and 
days ago, Monsieur le Cure stood against the 
pillar and began to scold. 

The women used to stand and gossip in the 
market-place; the children used to romp in the 
cobbled street; the men used to go fishing. 

The graveyard about this heap of stones, that 
125 



Journal of Small Things 

once was a church, is a strange place, full of 
trampled straw, and of long heaps of red and blue, 
that end in boots. The walls of the graveyard 
are everywhere pierced with holes, that often 
those long heaps lie under. Monsieur le Cure does 
not know why the straw is there. 

And so Monsieur le Cure has become a little 
mad. 

In one of those days, it seems, he came across 
Madelon sitting against a wall, quite dead. It 
was in the rue du Chateau. Much of the wall 
was fallen down, but just where Madelon sat 
the bit of it standing was radiant with roses. 
Madelon sat on the grass against the wall, her 
legs stuck straight out, her hands on the grass, 
her head hanging forward, tangled hair over 
her staring eyes, and her mouth wide open. 

The cure says he does not know what it was 
that happened to Madelon. 

By the fire, in a bright room, Monsieur le Cure 
talked to me of the church that Sunday morn- 
ing, and made me see it; and made me see, as 
if I stood there that other day with him, the 
broken things, and black, twisted things, and 
the things that the earth was taking back. He 
talked quietly, even of Madelon, and said he was 
60 glad that, that last time, God had not let him 
scold. 

126 



Remembering July 26th, 1914 

The last Sunday of Peace: Remem- 
bering July 26th, 1914 

"IT /"HEN they came back from Mass, up through 
' ' the chateau woods and the park and across 
the gardens, Anne Marie and Raoul walked 
together, and Anne Marie knew how happy she 
was. 

She had been happy every day of her eighteen 
years, but that day she realized it. 

Before she was quite awake she had been happy 
because of birds and church bells and sunshine 
and the fragrances of the garden. Snuggled 
down in the pillows that smelled of rose petals, 
she was happy because of her new white dress 
and the poppy hat. And as she waked she had 
known that she was happy apart from all those 
things, those lovely accustomed things, and far, 
far beyond them, because of Raoul. Because 
Raoul would be waking there, under the same 
roof. Because he would be waiting for her when 
she went down the stairs in the white dress and 
poppy hat. 

He had been waiting at the foot of the stairs. 
He had had a huge box of white orchids sent 
out for her from Paris. 

127 



Journal of Small Things 

He had gone to Mass with her and his mother, 
and her mother. She had sat three chairs away 
from him in the dusk of the chateau chapel. 

After Mass the two mothers walked ahead 
together, and she and Kaoul followed close behind, 
more nearly alone together than they had ever 
been before. 

He talked all the time; and she dimpled and 
blushed and was happy, and knew that she was 
happy, but could not say a word. 

They went slowly through the woods, 
where there were quantities of orange toadstools 
after the rain, and all the birds were singing ; and 
along the avenues of the park, and across the 
stiff gardens. 

Anne Marie's father was out on the terrace. 
He was walking nip and down the terrace and 
gesturing very strangely all by himself as he 
walked. 

Across the sunny spaces of lawn and gravel, 
box border and clipped yew and flowers, the 
chateau was all sunlit, its steep blue roofs and 
old soft yellow walls. 

Anne Marie's father came down the terrace 
steps to meet her mother and Raoul's mother, 
and, as they stood together he seemed to be 
telling them something. 

Anne Marie thought how odd of him to gesture 

128 



Remembering July 26th, 1914 

like that. Suddenly a wonderful idea and daring 
came to Anne Marie. She stopped and stood 
still there in the little gravel path, between the 
box edges and beds of roses and heliotrope and 
petunias that were so sweet in the sunshine. 
She found herself possessed of a great courage. 
She would stand there, and Raoul would stand 
there, and they would be quiet, quite alone to- 
gether. And she would dare to talk to him. She 
would dare to tell him things. There were so 
many things for her to tell and ask. Everything 
of life and of loving. She thought the droning 
of the bees was a hot and golden sound. It 
was the greatest, happiest, most wonderful 
moment of all her life. 

But Raoul said, ''Shall we not go on, Anne 
Marie; there is something the matter, shall we 
not go on and see what it is ? " 

His mother had turned around where she stood 
at the top of the steps and was looking at Raoul. 

The grey stone flags of the terrace were scat- 
tered over with all the Paris papers, that Anne 
Marie's father must have thrown down, and 
trampled on as he walked up and down the terrace. 

He said to Raoul, coming up the steps, "Well, 
this time it is certain. Whatever they try to 
show, every word in the papers means it. It will 
be inside the week, it is I who tell you." 
129 



Journal of Small Things 

"Raoul, Raoul," said Raoul's mother, very 
white. 

But Eaoul, up the steps in two bounds, did not 
hear her. * ' If only it may be ! How we 've hoped 
it! Oh, sir, do you really think it?" 

Anne Marie's mother had put her parasol and 
Mass book down on the broad stone balustrade 
of the terrace. She stooped over and took up 
one of the papers that lay on the flags. 

"It can't be," she said, reading. She spread 
the paper out on the top of the balustrade and 
stood pulling off her gloves as she read. "It 
can't be," she said again, pulling off first one soft 
grey glove and then the other. 

"It can't be," said Raoul's mother, always 
looking at Raoul. 

Anne Marie's father, beginning to pace the 
terrace again, said, "It will be, it will be!" 

Raoul said, "It's got to be," standing very 
straight and looking at nobody. 

Anne Marie thought, oh dear, oh dear, now they 
will talk and talk; and she had so wanted Raoul 
to stay with her down in the garden. 



I3<S 



Cantine, Christmas 



Cantine, Christmas 

A LL the babies seem to me to be blonde and 
-^ *■ of exactly the same size and quite square, 
about one year old, square, and very adorable. 
I never can remember which are the boys and 
which the girls. 

The mothers come from, we don't know where; 
and are, we don't know what. 

Last year there was written on a card and 
posted on the wall by the door, a thing that I 
think rather beautiful — 

"Toute femme enciente, ou qui nourrit son 
enfant, peut venir tous les jours prendre ici ses 
repas de midi et du soir, sans craindre aucune 
question. ' ' 

They came, at noon and at dusk, sick, ugly, 
stupid things, twice a day like that, from two 
hundred and fifty to three hundred of them. 
Bearing the children of soldiers, the children 
that will be France, they came without need of 
more than making each of them her X in the 
book on the shelf by the door. 

There is not room for more than forty-five at 
a time at the tables in the room that used to be 
a butcher's shop. They had to wait in turn 
outside in the street. 

131 



Journal of Small Things 

Outside in the ugly, forlorn street they waited, 
an ugly, forlorn line, in wind or rain. 

They all seemed frightened, not of the things 
that there really were to fear, like sickness 
and poverty and war, but of just opening the 
door and coming in and making their mark in 
the book, and finding places at the tables. 

They would have the door always kept shut. 
The steam of the soup was thick and horrid, 
always, in the room. I hate the smell of the 
poor. I hated those deformed, bedraggled, dulled 
women, as I served their soup. I hated them, 
because they would have the door kept shut. 
But I loved them, because their children would 
be France. 

This year we keep Christmas for the babies. 

It is odd how beautiful any woman is with a 
baby in her arms. Especially if she has only a 
shawl to wrap around herself and the baby, where 
it lies in the hollow of her arm. The faded, 
stained, worn shawl, drawn close about her head, 
falls in long lines down over her shoulders, and 
is gathered up in new folds around the nestling 
baby, the little soft shape of it, the little head, 
round, against her throat. 

Like that each one of the women makes you 
think of a beautiful, wonderful thing. 



132 



Perfectly Well 



Perfectly Well 

THE patronne was standing by the bed of 
little 10. 

I said, **It does not go well, little 10?" 

He said, "Not too well, madame." His poor 
face was twitching, and his poor hands on the 
sheet. 

The patronne said to me, "He has given us 
a bad night, that sort of a horror there." She 
stood with her hands purple on her broad hips 
and looked at him, and said, "Espece d'horreur, 
veux-tu finir de nous en m " 

He laughed and I laughed. 

It is dreadful, but I can bear it better like that. 
The little good sisters of other, different hospitals, 
the ladies of the Eed Cross, the calm and tender- 
ness and prayers, how strange it would seem. 

Little 10 laughed. 

"Oh, you laugh!" said the patronne, "and 
all the trouble you make us! Wait till you are 
well!'' She said, "Attends que tu sois gueri, 
et je te f ^trai un coup sur le citron." 

Madame Marthe came with the hypodermic 
syringe and tubes and glasses in a basin. Her 
hands were trembling. I love her when her hands 
tremble. 

133 



Journal of Small Things ^ 

The patronne said to me, *'He is off for another 

little party of billiards." 

That meant another operation. 

I said, ''You don't mind, little 10?" 

He said, *'Not too much, madame." 

I said, "You'll be better to-morrow." 

He said, "I'll be better to-morrow." 

"Name of God," said the patronne, "of course 

he'll be better to-morrow." 

Next day, when I tried not to cry because his 

bed was empty, she said to me, "It was no lie: 

he is better, isn't he?" 

Hospital, New Year's Day, 1916 

T X /"HAT made me dreadfully want to cry was 
' ' that they all, every one of them, wished 
me good health — little Louis, who is dying, and 
all the rest of them. 



The Apache Baby — ^Wednesday, 
January 5th — Cantine 

'■"^HEY telephoned from the cantine that the 

■■- baby of the girl Alice was dead at the 

hospital, and that the funeral was to be from 

134 



Wednesday, January 5th 

there that afternoon at three o'clock, and that 
Alice wanted me to come. 

Mademoiselle Eenee, the econome, who tele- 
phoned, said it was the apache girl with the 
ear-rings. 

I don't know why she wanted me to come to the 
funeral of her baby. Of the nearly three hundred 
women who came twice every day to the cantine, 
she had never been especially my friend. Her 
baby had been a sick little thing, and I had 
been touched by her wild love of it. It had no 
father, she told me. We never ask questions 
at the cantine, but she had been pleased to tell 
me that. She had said she was glad, because, 
so, it was all her own. She had rocked it as she 
held it wrapped in the folds of her red shawl, 
and shaken her long bright ear-rings, laughing 
down at it, over her bowl of soup. And now 
it is dead. 

Claire came to me. We had just time, if 
we took a taxi, to get to the hospital, stopping 
on the way for some flowers. It was raining 
more or less, and very dark. 

At the hospital they sent us round to the back, 
to a sort of shed opening on a street that was 
being built up, or had been torn down, I don't 
know which, desolate in the rain. 

In the room of the shed there were two families 
135 



Journal of Small Things 

in black, two mothers with dingy crape veils, 
and two dead babies in unpainted pine boxes 
that were open. 

The baby in the box on the right was quite 
big, the size of the most expensive doll one could 
get for a rich little girl at Christmas. There 
was a quite fine white tin wreath on the floor, 
tilted up against the pine box. The family of 
the bigger baby was quite numerous, half a 
dozen women, an old man, and several children. 
They all had shoes, and several of the 
women had umbrellas, and one of them had 
a hat. 

In the smaller box was the baby of Alice, very, 
very small and pinched and blue, even more small 
and pinched and blue than w^hen she used to 
bring it to the cantine. The family of Alice 
consisted of a small boy with bare feet and no 
hat, a small girl with a queer coloured skirt and 
felt slippers and a bit of black crape over her 
red hair, and a boy of perhaps seventeen, also 
in felt slippers, with his coat collar turned up 
and a muffler round his chin and his cap dragged 
down over his eyes. Alice had a hat and a crape 
veil and a black coat and skirt, and down-trodden, 
shapeless shoes much too big for her. 

There was a small bunch of violets in the pine 
box with the baby. 

136 



Wednesday, January 5th 

We put our roses down on the floor at the foot 
of the box. 

Both babies had on the little white slips that 
the hospital gives. 

The family of the bigger baby, and the brother 
and sister of Alice, stared at us. 

The mother of the bigger baby stood leaning 
against the wall, her head against the whitewash, 
her two hands over her eyes. She was making 
a queer little noise through her teeth. She 
kept it up all the time we were in the shed, a sort 
of hissing. She never once uncovered her eyes. 

Alice was standing close, close beside her baby 
in the pine box, just looking down at it. She 
never took her eyes from it. She is a tall, straight 
girl, but she was bent over, as if she were feeble 
and old. Her veil was pushed back from her 
face. It had been wet, and the black had run 
over her face. But it must have been the rain, 
for she was not crying at all. All the time in the 
shed she never moved or cried at all. 

Her little brother and sister stood back as if 
they were afraid of her. 

Claire and I waited near the door of the slied. 

For a long time we waited like that. 

Then two croquemorts came, in their shining 
black clothes. One of them had a sort of hammer 
in his hand, 

m 



Journal of Small Things 

They went to the box of the bigger baby, and 
one of them picked up the cover of the box and 
put it on, and the other began to drive the nails 
in. 

When he drove the first nail in, the woman 
with her eyes covered so she could not see him, 
heard, and knew what it was, and began to shriek. 
With her hands over her eyes she stood against 
the wall and shrieked. 

The croquemort drove in all the nails, and the 
woman kept on shrieking. 

Then the other croquemort put the tin wreath 
on the lid of the box, and then both of them came 
over to our baby. 

Alice had been just looking and looking at her 
baby. When the men came, and one of them 
took up the lid of the box from the floor, and the 
other stood with his hammer, she gathered her- 
self up as if she would spring upon the men 
who would take her little dead thing from her 
and put it away for ever. I thought she would 
fight over it, quite mad. The little brother and 
sister stood away from her, shivering. 

But what she did was to stoop and take up our 
roses from where they lay on the floor, and put 
them into the pine box with the baby. She put 
them all in about the baby, covering it with them. 
She hid it away under roses and then stood close, 

138 



Wednesday, January 5th 

close to it, while the croquemort drove the nails 
in, all the nails, one by one. 

Then one of the croquemorts took up the box 
of the bigger baby and carried it out of the shed 
and put it, with the tin wreath on the top of it, 
into a hearse that there was waiting on the left 
of the door. And the other croquemort took 
up the box of Alice's baby and carried it out, 
and put it into a hearse that was waiting on 
the right of the door. 

The family of the bigger baby followed 
away, after the hearse and one of the croque- 
morts, toward the depths of the city, two of the 
women leading the baby's mother, who still 
kept her hands over her eyes, but was not shriek- 
ing any more, only sobbing. I know no more 
of them after that. 

Alice went out of the door alone, and turned 
to the right, after the hearse in which was her 
dead child. 

Our croquemort would have gone ahead of her, 
but she would not let him pass. She would not 
have him between her and her baby. She kept 
close, close to the hearse, almost touching it, all 
the way. 

The croquemort walked behind her, and the 
brothers and sister walked behind him, and Claire 
and I at the end of it. 

139 



Journal of Small Things 

"We went through a tangle of poor streets, 
narrow and crowded. People drew back out of 
our way; some of them crossed themselves, and 
all of them were silent for an instant as the apache 
baby passed. 

We went through wide, forlorn streets of coal 
yards and warehouses and factories. The 
carters and labourers in those streets stopped 
to look at us and make the sign of the Cross, 
for the baby passing. 

We went over the canal bridge and^ the rail- 
road bridges, and along desolate streets of the 
outskirts, all in the rain. 

We went by barracks, where many blue coats, 
going about their duties, or standing idly about, 
drew up to salute the baby in its poor little un- 
painted rough box. 

At the fortifications many blue coats were 
digging trenches, and they all looked up and 
stopped their work to salute the baby. 

Twice we met groups of blue coats marching 
along the muddy empty roads, and both times 
the officer halted his men to salute the apache 
baby going by. 

The bigger brother walked like a true apache, 
slouching and slinking along, shoulders hunched 
up, head sunld down, face hidden between his 
muffler and the peak of his cap. The smaller 

140 



Wednesday, January 5th 

brother and the sister slouched too. But Alice 
walked quite straight, her head up, close, close to 
her child. 

So we came to the cemetery, in at the gates, 
and along a street of little marble houses, to a 
field where there were only wooden and black 
iron crosses, and to a hole that was dug in the 
red wet earth. 

There was a man waiting for us by the hole. 
He helped the croquemort to take the box out 
of the hearse and put it in the hole. 

Alice stood close, close to the edge, looking 
down into the grave. 

The rest of us stood together behind her. 

The croquemort gave her a little spade, and told 
her what to do with it. 

Then she stooped down and dug up a spadeful 
of earth and threw it into the hole where they 
had put the box. 

Each of us went in turn to give earth to earth. 
And then it was over. 

Alice stood close, close to the edge of the hole, 
and looked and looked down into it. 

The croquemort said something to Alice, but 
she did not move. He then spoke to the bigger 
brother, who shuffled up to Alice and tugged at her 
sleeve. 

But still she did not move. 
141 



Jovirnal of Small Things 

The smaller brother began to cry. 

Then the sister went to Alice and pulled at her 
other sleeve. 

"Take her away," the croquemort said to me. 

I said, ' ' Dear, we must go. ' ' 

Without looking at me, she said, "I — I stay 
here." She stood close, close to the hole and 
looked at the little pine box, and said again, quite 
quietly, "I stay here." 

I said, "You cannot stay," stupidly, as if we 
were discussing any ordinary coming or going. 

Her little sister, pulling at her skirt, said, * ' Say 
then, ask thou the lady to let thee go to supper 
at the cantine." 

"The cantine is for those who have babies," 
Alice answered. Then she looked at me for 
the first time, her great wild eyes, in her face 
that was stained and streaked where the black 
from the wet crape had run. 

Gegene's Croix de Guerre, One 
Thursday 

"1T7HEN Gegene went to the Invalides to receive 
^ * his Croix de Guerre, in the great Court of 
Honour, there was no one to go with him except 
Madame Marthe and me. 

142 



One Thursday 

Gegene belongs to nobody. He is an "enfant 
de TAssistance Publique." There is nobody- 
nearer to him than the peasants he was hired out 
to work for, somewhere do^vn in Brittany. 

I do not know whether or not they were kind to 
him, whether or not they cared about his going off 
to war, or would take interest in the honours he has 
won. We know nothing but what the Assistance 
knows about him; and he himself can tell us 
nothing, for he cannot speak at all. His wound 
was in the head; he has been trepanned 
twice. He may live a long time, he is such 
a strong young boy, but he will never be able 
to speak. His right side is stiffened, he cannot 
use that hand, and the foot drags. Except for 
that, and not being able to speak, he is quite 
well. 

Nobody knows how much he understands of 
it all, or what he thinks and feels. Sometimes 
he looks very sad. His boyish face, refined by 
pain, haunts me when I am away from the 
hospital. But sometimes he seems quite con- 
tent, happy to be just well housed and fed and 
petted by us. "We do not laiow what will be- 
come of him when he can no longer stay in the 
hospital. 

Madame Marthe says, "What would you have? 
he is not the only one. ' ' 

143 



Journal of Small Things 

But she is very kind to him, and when she has 
a half-day's leave she often takes him out with 
her, for a little treat. 

She and I hurried through the dressings this 
morning and had everything done, our cylinders 
sent to the sterilization, the apparatus in order, the 
ward quite neat, in time to go and have lunch, 
the three of us together, in a big cafe of the Boule- 
vards. 

Gegene was too excited to eat, and so was 
little Madame Marthe, in her cap of the "Ville 
de Paris" and her blue woollen shawl. She had 
to leave it for me to cut up Gegene 's chicken 
and pour his red wine for him. 

It rained ; the crowd in the Place des Invalides 
stood under dripping umbrellas. 

In the Court of Honour the arcades were 
packed with wet people, and out in the great 
central space there was no shelter but umbrellas 
for the poor great splendid heroes like Gegene. 

There they all stood together, those who could 
stand, in all the pride and tragedy of their crutches 
and their bandages — one little blinded officer 
with his head cocked sideways like a bird's. And 
those who could not stand had chairs and benches ; 
two or three were there on stretchers. 

There was a group of women in deep mourning, 
— some of them with children — who had come 

144 



One Thursday 

to receive the decorations of their dead hus- 
bands or sons. 

There were the great men of the General Staff, 
— ^maybe the Minister of War, maybe the Presi- 
dent, maybe the Generalissimo himself — with all 
their high officers around them, already arrived, 
near the entrance, astir with preparation. 

Out in the centre of the Court, grouped almost 
motionlessly, were the men who waited to receive 
their honours. 

We could see our Gegene, standing up very tall 
and straight among them. 

"Isn't he nice?" I said to Madame Marthe, 
"Isn't he nice?" 

But Madame Marthe was crying — funny little 
tears, and her nose very red. "Oh!" she said, 
"Oh, what will happen when that man with the 
gold braid comes to Gegene? He will speak to 
Gegene, and Gegene cannot answer! He will 
hold out his hand to Gegene, and Gegene will not 
be able to take it ! " 

We clutched each other in panic, and then the 
music broke out into all the splendour of the 
Marseillaise. 



145 



Journal of Small Things 

Empty Memories 

CEVENTEEN months after the day when he 
'^ went out for the first time, he was killed 
beside his mitrailleuse. 

He had been home in the meanwhile twice on 
leave, and there had been nothing changed. He 
had won many honours, and she supposed the 
other woman had been proud of him. For her- 
self she had seen him very little and always 
pleasantly. She was glad now that it had been 
only pleasantly. 

But it was the day of that first August, the day 
of his first going, that one day, that one hour, she 
kept living again and again through. It kept 
being present with her, curiously. 

He had arrived — he had telegraphed — about 
four of the afternoon, she did not know fiom 
where. He would have to leave again before 
five o'clock. She knew, of course, with whom he 
had been. She thought, waiting for him, what 
an irony that it should be like this, after all the 
bitterness, he was coming back to her, and to 
the old house of his people, in the street of many 
gardens. 

She thought it would be awkward for them 
both. What could they say to one another? 

She wondered if it had been terrible to him to 
146 



Empty Memories 

leave the other woman. Probably the other 
woman was beautiful. All those women were beau- 
tiful. She thought, perhaps that other woman 
loved him and eared what happened to him. 

Her two little boys were playing in the room. 

The great closed rooms, to which she had 
brought them back hurriedly from the seaside, 
fascinated them. 

The bigger little one, in his sailor suit with the 
huge collar was saying, ** That's the old witch's 
cave, Toto, in the snow mountain.'* 

The smaller one, with the curls and the Russian 
blouse, said, *'0h, Zizi!" 

"Yes; and, Toto, that big lump is the giant, 
sleeping. ' ' 

"Oh, Zizi!" 

Then their father came. 

The little boys hung back and stared at him; 
they never had known him really well. 

Their mother stood up and went to meet him, 
across the wide room. "You've had a horrid 
journey," she said, 

"I've been fifty hours in the train," he an- 
swered. "Hallo, small boys, there!" 

"Toto," said Zizi, "he's going to be a soldier!" 

"Oh, Zizi!" said Toto. 

The bigger boy came over to his father. "I 
know a chap," he said, "it's the son of a 
147 



Journal of Small Things 

friend of mademoiselle's, whose father is dead and 
cannot be a soldier." 

''Poor chap," said his father. 

His wife said, ''Old Denis has got your things 
together. All the other men-servants are gone. 
He has put you something to eat on the dining- 
room table." 

He said, ' ' Will you come with me, do you mind ? 
iVe things to say to you, and there is so little 
time." 

But when they sat together at one corner of the 
big shining table, he did not seem to know what 
to say. He tried to eat, but it seemed as if he could 
not eat. He pushed the plate away and leaned 
his elbows on the table and his head in his hands. 

She thought she would like to do something for 
him, but did not know what to do. Again she 
said, ' ' It must have been dreadful in the train. ' ' 

"It was wonderful," he said. Then, sitting 
still with his face hidden, he went on: "We 
were singing all the time. Wherever the train 
stopped people gave us flowers; the whole train 
was full of flowers, you know. They were most 
of them boys of the young classes in the train. 
We sang the most absurd things — nursery rhymes, 
and old cannons, 'Freres Jacques' and 'Cceur de 
Lise,' and those, you know. What is the one 
about 'Papa Lapin'? None of us could re- 

148 



Hospital 

member the one about 'Papa Lapin,' you know." 

"I don't know," she replied. It had always 
annoyed her, his trick of saying, "You know." 
She sat playing with something on the table. 

He said again, "The whole train was full of 
flowers. 'Papa Lapin,' 'Papa Lapin' — how 
irritating, you know, when one can't remember." 

He sat up suddenly erect, and said, "You'll 
take the boys and go down to the old place and 
look after things. It has always bored you, but 
after all it is for Zizi. And be good to my 
mother, will you, though you don't like her — she, 
she remembers '70. And I've not been of much 
use to her. I 've not been of much use to you, nor 
to any one. ' ' He stopped short. 

It was odd that suddenly she, who never had 
thought much about him, or felt things at all 
about him, should have known this thing. She 
had known as she sat there with him, alone in the 
dining-room, by the untouched things on the 
table, that he never would come back. He was 
one of those who never come back. 

Hospital 

/^ FTEN I am sad because I cannot worry 

^^ enough about the 11, Charles. I forget 

him even when I am in the ward. His is the 

149 



Journal of Small Things 

bed I see first when I look through the holes of 
the paint in the glass-topped door, opposite, 
away at the far end of the v/ard. There he 
has been, always, every day, through all the 
endless months since the Marne, propped up 
against a table board and two pillows and a sheet 
of black rubber. He breathes always more and 
more painfully, and coughs always more and 
more. The fever lines on his chart zigzag up 
and down, in long dreadful points. He has be- 
come very cross and exacting. He scolds us in 
little feeble gasps, with little feeble gestures. 
He is twenty-one years old, and has very long 
eyelashes. 

Yesterday when I went to say good-bye to 
him at the end of the day he was crying there in 
his corner, quietly, all by himself. His long eye- 
lashes were all wet. I said, **0h, little Charles, 
oh, little Charles!" and kept saying it over and 
over, and had nothing else in all the world to 
say. I patted his hands, that always lie 
both of them together upon the strap which 
is fastened round the bar at the foot of the 
bed, by which he is sometimes able to pull him- 
self up. 

His hands are white and thin and crooked, like 
the roots of things that belong in the earth; 
while I patted his hands I was thinking that they 

150 



Hautiquet 

did not seem to belong in the light and air at all. 
This morning I thought, "Hoav absurd to have 
brought him a little pot of cream!" A little pot 
of cream for a man who is dying. 



Hautiquet 

TTAUTIQUET has gone back to the front. He 
•'■ *^ would not let them tell me he was going. 
I never saw him to say good-bye. Last night, I 
said, as usual, "Bon soir, tout le monde, au 
revoir a demain!" And Hautiquet said with the 
rest, **A demain, Madame." He left a little 
package to be given to me after he was gone. 

He was one of the older ones. He had been 
ill in the first winter with rheumatism and pleu- 
risy. He went back and fought all summer, and 
all through the Champagne, and till Christmas. 
Then he got rheumatism again, this time in his 
eyes. He has been nearly blind since then, here 
in the hospital. 

He was a clumsy peasant who never talked 
much. And of what he did say I could only 
understand about half. I did not know that he 
thought about me at all. 

But in the little package he left for me there was 
151 



Journal of Small Things 

an aluminum heart, made out of the aluminum 
from a shell. Madame Marthe says he had been 
nearly all the time working at it, because he had 
clumsy hands and could scarcely see. He had 
had much trouble getting the shape right. He 
had cut my initials on one side of it and his on 
the other, crookedly, because he was so nearly 
blind. 



Jean Fernand 

T TE had curly yellow hair and big blue eyes. 
■*■ -*■ He got well terribly fast. I was wishing all 
the time that he would take longer about it. He 
was so young. 

His eyes were so blue, and round, and had seen 
all the horrors of the great retreat. The look of 
those things had stayed in his round young blue 
eyes. 

He told mc he was afraid of going back, but 
that he was glad to go because ''tons les copains 
sont la." He said he couldn't bear to think of 
them there, when he was safe out of it. "It is as 
if they were fighting for me, ' ' he said, ' ' and being 
wounded for me, and dying." 

I don't know why I write of him in the past 
tense, for I have always the most amusing letters 

152 



Wednesday, February 9th 

from him, from there. He is near Verdun. This 
morning I got from him a little snapshot a copain 
had made of him, down on all-fours in the bottom 
of his trench feeding a baby pig out of a bottle. 



Wednesday, February 9th 

Post Card 

"DOINET is very happy to-day. He has news 
•^-^ of his people at last. Since he left them in 
the first days, all through these months and 
months, it has been as if they had been simply 
swept away out of the world. 

Everything that Boinet loved was swept away 
by the great black wave of the war. Into what 
depth of the end of all things all his life has been 
swept away! He has been imagining and imagin- 
ing. He says, all the time in the trenches he was 
tortured by imagining things that might have 
happened to his three little sisters. Boinet is 
twenty-two, and the three sisters were younger 
than he, and beautiful, he says. Odd, how one 
speaks always in the past tense of people whom 
the war has taken into its dark spaces. Boinet 
tells how he loved his mother, as if it were a thing 
pf another life, 

J53 



Journal of Small Things 

And here is his post card saying that they are 
all quite well, and signed by every one of them. 

For nearly a year Boinet has been in the hos- 
pital, Number 16. He has troubled about his 
horrible burns scarcely at all, but we have thought 
he would go mad torturing himself with imagining 
things that might have happened to his people. 

By means of an agency here, and the Mairie 
at Toureoing, it was possible, at last, for his 
people to send him a post card of six lines. 

It came this morning; I have had to read it 
to him about fifty times over. 

It says that they are all very well, and for him 
to give news of Pierre, the husband of his sister 
Josette, and it is signed with all their dear, dear 
names, Pere, Mere, Josette, Marie, Cloton. 

Only it was sad, for Boinet knows that the hus- 
band of poor little Josette, married that last July 
was killed long ago in one of the first battles of 
the war. 



The New 25 

TTE is of Morocco, brown and very lonely, and 
■*• •*■ always shivering with cold. He speaks 
scarcely any French. His great dark eyes look 

154 



The New 25 

to one with all the sadness of the eyes of animals 
that are dumb. Nobody understands him. He 
smiles up at us, with his beautiful white teeth and 
his big dumb eyes, and does not understand what 
we are saying. He makes me little magic-lan- 
terns out of orange rinds, and tells me long stories 
about them, of which I understand not a word. 

Once when I went back, just for an afternoon's 
visit to the hospital, I was wearing a bright 
blue silk scarf, and he took it and held it and cried 
over it, and would not give it back to me. I 
cannot imagine of what it reminded him, why he 
cried, or why he loved it. 

He has three tiny little wooden dolls, scarcely 
bigger than almonds and wonderfully carved, 
that he never will let us touch. Madame Marthe 
thinks that they are strange gods of his; but I 
think they represent three children, far away, in 
lands where skies are blue, like my scarf. 

He is only slightly wounded; very soon he 
will have to unwrap himself from my big white 
woollen shawl, and go away again to battles. 

And I suppose I shall never know anything 
more about him. 



155 



Journal of Small Things 



Marketing 

T T E was standing half turned away from the 
•*■ ■*■ others, the fat old woman in the woollen 
knitted shawl and a girl with a pretty brown 
bare head. He was holding a big market basket 
very carefully in both hands. I thought 
there was something odd about the careful way 
he held it and the way he stood, his head turned 
to one side and hanging a bit. 

The old woman and the girl were talking very 
much about the cabbages, with the woman of the 
push-cart, also old and also wearing a knitted 
woollen shawl. 

In the stir and noise of the street market the 
way the tall broad young soldier stood so still 
and silent did seem odd. And he was holding 
the basket with such very great care. 

There was a live white goose in the basket. It 
kept stretching its long neck up over the rim of 
the basket and peering about, opening and shut- 
ting its yellow bill and hissing at people. 

When the old woman and the girl had finished 
their discussion and selected their cabbage, they 
pushed the cabbage into the market basket along 
with the goose, and all the time the soldier held 
the basket carefully. 



Hospital 

Then the old woman put her arm through 
one of his arms, and the girl put her arm 
through the other. As he turned to go where 
they would take him, I saw that he was blind; 
the wound had healed, but it was as if his eyes 
were closed. He very carefully let go the 
basket with one hand, and with the other hand, 
the girl's rather impatient touch on his elbow, he 
made a salute to where he thought the woman of 
the push-cart was standing, and then the old 
woman and the girl led him away with the 
basket. 



Hospital 

^ I ^HE wards of "our" floor get always all the 
-*■ light there is. When there is sunlight it all 
comes in and picks the dust motes up and sets 
them dancing, down steep slants and ladders. 
"When there is wind it sobs and sings along the 
wards and corridors. The rain makes wide sweeps 
of the great windows, and mists press very close 
against them and get into the wards and drift 
there. When there was snow, in these few days 
the rooms were all full of its whiteness. Almost 
it was as if its silence were there, and its peace. 



-^$7 



Journal of Small Things 

Saturday, March 5th 

** 1^ HE night was full of great bells booming, Ver- 
■*• dun, Verdun, Verdun. And yet there were 
no bells. 

I never saw a darker morning come to Paris. 
The darkness came into the room, thick and wet 
and cold. 

I had my breakfast by firelight. 

The crows are back already in the garden; the 
bare black treetops were full of them this dark 
morning, and not one of them stirred or made a 
sound. 

The lamps of the trams were lighted, and the 
lamps of the streets and quays and bridges. 

The river is very high, the trees of the margins 
stand drowning. 

The snow of these last days has stayed on in 
places, as yellow as f6g and smoke. 

In the old great beautiful courtyards of the 
hospital the snow is quite deep, on the roofs and 
ledges of red brick and grey stone, and on the huge 
square old cobbles, and on the black tracery 
of trees and bushes and of the vines along the 
walls. 

The buds, that were soft and green last week, 
are black now; I was afraid to go and touch 
them and find them frozen hard. 
158 



Saturday Night before Easter 

The blackbird was singing. He has been back 
for nine days. It was dreadful in the dark and 
cold to hear him singing. How terrible all lovely 
things are become! 



Same day 

TN the half dark I came home along the canal. 
■■■ In these nights, coming home from the hos- 
pital, I have learned always more and more 
that the canal is beautiful, curving down between 
its old poor black tumbling houses, under its 
black bridges. 

To-night the few lights of the quays and of 
windows fell into the water of the canal, just 
odds and ends of gold. 

I stopped and stood and looked. 

It had been a bad day in my ward. 

I thought, how beautiful ugly things are be- 
come! 



Saturday night before Easter 

'Tp HE cool wet fresh smells of the garden, and of 

-■- all the gardens of the quarter, come in at my 

wide window. It is almost midnight, the rain 

159 



Journal of Small Things 

has stopped, and it is not cold any more. Some- 
times the crows talk together from the top of the 
trees where their nests are, above the old low 
roofs my window looks across. There has been 
for days now, in all the rain and cold, a drift of 
green about the trees, the fine green mesh of a 
veil that seems to float, it is so bright and frail, 
about the black wintry tree-trunks and boughs 
and branches. The blackbirds came back last 
week to the garden. 

But it is only to-night that one can believe in 
spring. 

In the wet sky, over the roofs and chimneys, 
and the treetops, there are some stars that hang 
as big and near as lamps. At dawn perhap'^ the 
nightingale will be singing. 



Easter Day 

TT is wonderful that spring should come on 
■■■ Easter Day. 

One waked — and lo, winter was over and 
passed. There was a moment, in waking, of not 
being able to believe at all in unhappiness. 

The nightingale was singing, the sun was coming 
up out of the filmy leaves of the garden, the bells 
of all the churches were pouring out Easter. 
?69 



Easter Day 

The river was misty in the early morning, under 
the sunshine, mauve and opal and blue. The 
trees of the quays, in their fragile leaf, seemed to 
drift in the mist and sunshine. I could not tell 
if the trees were gold or green in the Tuileries 
gardens. They were quite golden against the 
long purple mass of the Louvre, and qaite golden 
up the river, where there is an especially bright 
blur of them under the purple towers and gable 
of Notre Dame. 

The Halles were full of country and spring. 

My OAvn poor ugly canal had colours and lines 
of spring about it; its dingy, dark old houses 
were lifted into a sky so lovely that they 
seemed to have become quite lovely too, and 
its water, under the poor bridges, was full of 
gold and blue and purple and deep shining. 

All the birds were singing in the great court- 
yards of the hospital, and all the opening buds 
sang too, and the green, green grass in its close 
bindings of stone. 

Cordier — his face again bandaged, for he 
has been worse of late — tried to tell me some- 
thing. I could make out, ''Nouveaux, Verdun, 
chez vous, tres grands blesses," and then there 
was to open the door upon the ward's new 
tragedies and glories. 



i6i 



Journal of Small Things 

Frogs 

OHE, his mother, wished he wouldn't be so 
^^ sweet. It was what she had longed for since 
he was a little boy, an indifferent, cold little child, 
and dreamed of. It made it difficult for her not 
to break down. And how dreary that would be 
for him, who was so glad to come home. 

Always he had been very bored at home. He 
never since he was at all grown-up — he was 
twenty-one — had stayed an hour more than was 
necessary in the old dark sad castle. Now he 
had six days, just six days, for his own, to do with 
whatever he chose, away from those places of 
death, and it seemed that there was nothing he 
wanted but the old dull things that always before 
had so bored him. 

She had been coming up from the village in 
the soft wet April afternoon, by the wide central 
avenue of the parterres between the little clipped 
yew trees, when he came out to the terrace. She 
had an instant's sick trror of thinking he was 
killed, and that this was her vision of him. But 
he was calling to her, and laughing. She had 
stopped, and stood quite still, and he had come 
eagerly, running down the steps to her. 

They had six days together. 

Often she had thought of the old strong castle 
162 



Frogs 

that it was a place meant for great things to hap- 
pen in, glories and disasters. Small things were 
of no matter in it. There had been no room bright 
and light enough for a little child to be gay in. 
Her baby's room had had stone walls and a high 
carved ceiling and windows four feet deep. If 
ever he had laughed and shouted, his little voice 
had been lost among old echoes. How could 
any child not have been afraid of the shadows 
that trailed and lurked along the corridors and 
upon the stairs. 

She specially remembered her little son stand- 
ing with Miss on the top of the terrace steps, 
under the great Watch Tower, never running to 
meet her as she came up through the garden, the 
shadow of the stern old house prisoning him, like 
some dark spell, in his little white sailor dress. 

Now, he had come to meet her eagerly, as she 
had so used to wish he would. 

In the six days he was all the things to her 
that she had ever dreamed of. He was her little 
boy who needed her. He had wild gay moments, 
when his gaiety swept her along, and moments 
that needed her comforting. 

Then it was their last day together, a softly 
raining day. 

In the morning they went for a long tramp 
through their own woods and on into the forest, 
163 



Journal of Small Things 

deeper and deeper. All the forest ways were full 
of wet blue hyacinths and songs of thrushes. 
The little rain made music in the April branches, 
and the wet smells were as incense in the forest 
aisles. When they came home he was hungry. 
Nothing would do but that they should go down 
to the village to the Place de I'Eglise and get spice 
bread and barley sugar from old Madame 
Champenot, as he had used to do when he was a 
small boy to whom his mother gave five sous for 
being good. 

They must go down the terrace steps and along 
the avenue to the Queen's Bosquet, where the old 
statues stood together dressed in ivy, and through 
the little stern gate in the rampart walls, and 
across the moat by the new bridge, that was so 
old, to the Place of the church. 

Thatched roofs and tiled roofs were touched 
with spring wherever moss and lichen clung to 
them, green and grey and yellow. 

He had gone into the little shop, and she 
had waited outside, not able to talk to any one. 

The great Watch Tower of the castle, and the 
low square grey tower of the church, and all the 
crooked old tall black chimney-pots seemed to 
swim in the blue of the sky. 

Waiting there she felt that the coming of 
spring was sad almost past bearing. She thought, 
164 



Frogs 

soon the frogs in the castle moats would be 
singing their lonesome song. 

Afterwards they went round to the stables, 
from which all the horses were gone, and he was 
sad to think how long he had forgotten his little 
old pony, scarcely bigger than a dog. 

In the afternoon he must go everywhere about 
the house, to all the old rooms and corridors 
and stairways, that he never before had known 
he loved. She must go with him, through the 
great dim attics, and up the tower stairs, and 
out on to the battlements, to the sunset; down 
into the great stone-vaulted kitchens, and the 
cellars that had been dungeons. They went 
laughingly at first. But afterwards they did 
not laugh any more. It had come to have 
the sacredness of a pilgrimage, their small 
journeying. 

He talked quite gaily while they were at dinner 
in the long dining-hall under the minstrel's 
gallery. 

But when they went to her little study after- 
wards together, they both were very silent. 

There was a fire burning, but all the windows 
were open. 

And as they sat there, almost silently together, 
they heard the first frogs singing in the castle 
moat. He laughed, and would have her teU him 
165 



Journal of Small Things 

the story of the Frog Princess, that he never had 
eared for her to tell him when he was a little boy. 

She knew that she would never listen to the 
frogs again without remembering that night. 

She wondered if the memory would become 
an agony to her. It seemed to her strange that, 
caring so much, she could not know. 



Thursday, April 27th 

T TNDER the walls of St. Germain des Pres, and 
^^ the chestnut trees in their spring misty 
leaf of amber and topaz and ruby, a vendor of, 
I don't know what, had set up a little booth and 
shaded it with an indigo blue bit of canvas. The 
shade was deep purple under the blue canvas, 
and brass and bronze and copper and rust-red 
things had vague shapes in the shadow. 

It was so beautiful that I was happy for all of a 
minute, passing in the tram on my way to the 
cantine. 



166 



The Boy with Almond Eyes 

The Boy with Almond Eyes 

^T^HEY tell me that when they suffer I make 

little growling noises in my throat. They 

laugh and say, "Now the little Madame is angry!" 

I am angry, I am furious. I am furious against 
suffering. I hate suffering. 

If they scream I do not mind so much, but 
when they suffer silently, it is terrible. 

Once the ward doctor thought I was going to 
cry. 

I was holding the stump of a boy's leg while 
they dressed it. The leg had been cut off at the 
Front, hurriedly, anyhow, and the nerves left 
exposed. 

The boy shuddered and quivered all over, and 
would not make a sound, and grew rigid with pain, 
stiff, and quite cold, and never made a sound. 

The doctor, with the probe in his rubber-gloved 
hands, looked at me, and said, "You are going 
to cry! You must not cry before the wounded, 
it unnerves them." 

And then I heard myself growling, with dread- 
ful big words of the patronne's smothered under 
the growls. 

And the little boy laughed out, through every- 
thing, just like a mischievous bad little boy. 
167 



Journal of Small Things 



Monday, May ist 

TO-DAY is so beautiful, many people must have 
been happy for a moment just in waking. 
It is so difficult not to be happy. It is such a 
wonderful thing to open one's blinds to a sun- 
shiny May morning. And then there has to be 
the next moment. 



May 3rd 

IN other years also the spring was sad. There 
was always that exquisite lovely poignant 
sadness of spring. 

These days are too beautiful. It seems as if 
one could not bear them. 

I think it is because so much beauty makes one 
want happiness. 

One cannot understand, in such loveliness, why 
one is not happy. 

Something is asked of us that we cannot answer. 

I remember Eosclyne's saying, long before there 
was war, one sunset, down by the sea in the 
south — 

"So much happiness would be needed to fill 
the beauty of the day." 

168 



Hospital, Friday, May 5th 

May 4th 

Y^T perhaps in this cruel year spring is less 
cruel. Not to be happy is, in this year, the 
inevitable thing. One is less lonely in each his 
own special lack of happiness. And each one may 
think he would be happy, perfectly, if only there 
were no war. 



Hospital, Friday, May 5th 



T 



^HEY have taken away all my little soldiers. 
I did not know at all. I came just as usual, 
and did not notice any unusual confusion. I 
heard much noise as I ran up the stairs, but 
there is always noise in the corridors. 

When I got to the top of the stairs, there was 
the last batch of them, in their patched faded 
old uniforms, with their crutches and bandages 
and their bundles, all packed into the lift that 
was just started down. I could not even see who 
they were. 

Some one called "Madame, oh, Madame!" 

I think it was Barbet, the little 4. 

I turned to run down the stairs to catch them 
up at the bottom, as they would get out of the 
169 



Journal of Small Things 

lift, but Madame Marthe came out of the pa- 
tronne's room, with a huge jar, of I don't know 
what, in her arms, and called to me, "Quick, the 
new ones will be arriving. Fetch our sheets from 
Madame Bayle!" 

Twenty-six beds and ten stretcher beds all 
left empty. 

Every one is gone, except little Charles who 
is dying, and 14, whose arm has just been 
amputated. I don't know where they are 
gone. Some to the Maison Blanche and some 
to St. Maurice, some to their depots, some to 
country hospitals. The patronne has had no time 
to tell me where they are gone. "When she has 
time she will have forgotten, and cannot trouble 
to look up the lists of them. Madame Marthe 
does not laiow. She does not care. She is used 
to it. 

But I — I am not used to it. I have loved them. 
I had nursed them so long, and done so many odds 
and ends of things for them, silly things and 
tragic things. I had helped them to get well. 
Keally and truly I had helped them to get well. 
I had been so happy to have helped them. And 
now I do not know what has become of them. 



170 



Hospital — Arrival, Saturday, 6th 

Hospital — Arrival, Saturday, 6th 

** I "^ HEY are very tired. They want to be let 
■■■ alone. They do not care what happens to 
them, or to the little queer odds and ends of things 
in their bundles. 

They were bathed in the admission room; 
Madame ]\Iarthe and Madame Alice were called 
there. Madame Madeline threw out their dirty 
torn clothes, and the boots of those who had 
boots, to Madame Bayle in the hall. 

Madame Bayle made Joseph take all that 
away, and gave me each man's own little things 
to put on the night table of his bed, his kepi 
and his beret, if it were not lost, a pipe, a 
tobacco pouch, perhaps a big nickel watch, some 
letters, the photograph of a girl or an old woman, 
a purse with a few sous in it. Several of them 
have medals, the Croix de Guerre and the military 
medal, and one had a chaplet that I had to hide 
under the photograph of an old woman in her 
best bonnet. "Number 9," says Madame 
Bayle, "Number 16, Number 8," and dumps the 
poor little handfuls of things into my apron. 

"All your things are here," I say to the men, 
"look, Monsieur 8, I have put them so on the 
table. I ynW move the table to the other side be- 
cause of your arm. Little Alpin, here is your 
171 



Journal of Small Things 

beret hung on the knob at the lop of the bed, 
waiting for you to go out into Paris. And you, 
my little one, here are your two medals, I pin 
them to the edge of your chart. How proud 
you must be!" 

But he does not care at all. He is a little 
young child, of the class 16. He has a round, boy 
face and big, round, blue eyes like a child's. He 
only wants to lie with his eyes shut. He is the 
number 3. His right leg is amputated, and his 
left foot is in plaster. 

They are all men from Verdun, wounded eight 
or fifteen days ago, who have been moved from 
one to another hospital of the Front. They do 
not want to talk about it. They want to just lie 
still with their eyes closed — except the one who 
screams, the 24. 

The 24 screams and screams. He also has had 
a leg amputated. He is perhaps twenty years 
old. He is a big blonde boy. He clutches the 
bars of the top of the bed with his two hands, and 
drags all his rigid weight upon his hands, and 
screams, with wide-open eyes that stare and 
stare. 

Also the man wounded in the head, the Number 
6, lies with his eyes wide staring open and like 
glass. He has a colonial medal that I do not 
know, and the Croix de Guerre. They do not 

172 



The Chechia, Monday, May 15th 

yet know if he can speak or not. Madame Marthe 
told me while she was washing her hands at the 
chariot that he may live quite long. 

She said, ''The chief is coming to see the 
wounds, we must cut all the dressings. Take 
your scissors, and begin to the right of the door." 



The Chechia, Monday, May 15th 



I 



SUPPOSE because to-day the sunshine is 
happy, Charles, the little 11, who has been 
in his bed in the corner since the days of the 
Marne, has taken a fancy to have all his things 
got ready for him in case he wants to go out. 
He says that any day now he may be wanting to 
go out. 

He is of the ler Zouaves, and it is a red cap he 
must have, a Chechia. Nobody knows what be- 
came of his, it is so long since he had worn it. He 
never thought of it himself until to-day. But 
to-day he thinks of nothing else. 

Number 10 and Number 12— new these last 
days— say he waked them up talking about it. 
When Madame Marthe came on at six o'clock he 
beckoned to her at the door, and when she came, 
he whispered— did she think he might ask the 
American for it? 

173 



Journal of Small Things 

He was very red when he asked me, and then 
very white, and his hands clasped and un- 
clasped. 

Did I think I could have it to-morrow? Did 
I think I could have it this afternoon? And 
did I think that possibly, possibly I could get a 
tassel for it: a big lavender tassel that would 
hang down all at one side. 



Monday, May 29th 

TWENT this afternoon to the Pre Catelan, for 
■*■ the first time in very long. I went in by the 
gate near the stone column. 

There were quite a lot of motors waiting at the 
gate ; it did not look war as it did last year. Last 
year, in May, the gates were always almost shut, 
and when people came they had to push through. 
Last year the little park was very empty. We 
used to wander as we pleased across the lawns 
and gather primroses that grew for nobody. But 
now there were people in the paths; especially 
Nounou with her broad ribbons and her camp- 
stool, and the baby, and Monsieur I'Abbe, playing 
blind man's bufP with the bigger children. 

Green lawns, bright as live green fire, the trees 

m 



Monday, May 29th 

all in delicate misty leaf, light greens and dark 
greens and copper and amber and gold, filmy 
and drifting, as veils, about the trunks and 
boughs and branches. 

The flower-beds were full of hyacinths and 
forget-me-nots. 

Never, never, surely has spring meant so much 
as in these two years of war. 

All the birds of spring were singing. All of 
them. The grass of the lawns was full of little 
starry pink and white daisies. 

By the little watercourse there was a bank of 
blue flowers. They were reflected in the water, 
very, very blue. I do not know what they were. 
They were of a much more intense blue than the 
myosotis. I did not go to see what they were; I 
thought they might be the blue flowers of happi- 
ness, and that it was better I did not go too near. 
The hideous, huge restaurant is a hospital. 
The paths and the road to it, and the lawns and 
garden beds about it are corded off that people 
may not go and look. From the distance, you 
see vague, white shapes of things, and figures all 
in white, moving about inside the great plate- 
glass windows! 

What wonderful people used to sit at the tables, 
in those windows! 

What is there now on the raised platform of the 
175 



Journal of Small Things 

music? The music used to be so gay. Did 
people ever really dance there? 

How queer pain and grief seem to be, in this 
place that they have taken over. Was this really 
ever a place so gay and brilliant, that no other 
place of the world symbolized quite as fragile a 
thing? 



Thursday, June ist 

TTERDUN, Verdun, Verdun. The great bells, 
^ that are not really bells, are still ringing and 
ringing. One hears them ringing through the 
streets of Paris, up and down, all night long. Out 
in the country they must be ringing, and ringing 
across all the fields and forests, and through the 
hills, and along all the roads and rivers, and to all 
the edges of the land. 

Even if they were dirges, tolling, they would 
yet always have been triumphant bells. 



The Queen: To her 

A BEAUTIFUL thing has happened in a beauti- 

-*■ ^ ful hospital. Going to that hospital from 

mine, what seems most beautiful about it, and 

176 



The Oueen 

very strange, is its peace. It is so quiet. The 
little gentle nuns move softly and have sweet 
low voices. The women who work there are all of 
them women who choose to serve, and they serve 
lovingly. One feels there quietness and sym- 
pathy, and something that I think must be just 
the love of God. My hospital seems like a 
nightmare in that beautiful place. 

One day there came to visit that beautiful 
hospital a very gentle lady, than whose story 
there is none more tragic in the whole world. 

She is a queen who lives in exile. She has known 
every sorrow that a woman can know, and that 
a queen can know, every one. And she lives, 
with the memory of her sorrows, in exile. 

She may come to France at times for visits of 
which few people are aware; and those are the 
times that are most nearly happy for her, for she 
loves France, and the France that knows her, that 
is so truly her own, loves her greatly. 

The little soldiers of France might have been 
her soldiers. If they realized, how they would 
love to be her soldiers! What would it not mean 
to them to have such a queen to fight for ? 

The soldiers in the beautiful hospital were not 

told at first that it was a queen who came that 

day to see them. They only knew that it was a 

very lovely lady. She understood just how to 

177 



Journal of Small Things 

talk to them, just how to look at them. They 
were men who had given everything they had 
to give for the country that she loved, that 
was indeed her country, and she loved them, 
every one of them, and her love for them was in 
her eyes and on her lips and in her voice. She had 
known so much of suffering that she could take the 
suffering of each man for her own to bear with him. 

There was a man who was dying. He was not 
a beautiful young boy, but one of those older 
little soldiers who touch one's heart so. The 
thin, worn, stooping little soldier type who has 
his wife and the children and the old people to 
be anxious about while he serves his France. 
The bearded, anxious-eyed little soldier type 
who knows just what it all means, and who has 
the flame of the spirit of France shining in his 
always rather haggard eyes. 

This little soldier was dying ; there was no hope 
at all. He knew quite well. His wife and 
babies were far away and could not come to 
him. And he was glad of that, he wanted his 
wife to be spared all she might be spared of pain. 
He was glad she would not have to remember 
his suffering so. The nurse had promised to 
tell his wife always that he had not suffered at all. 
His nurse had promised him that she would 
always keep sight of his wife and the babies, and 
178 



The Queen 

be sure that no harm came to the old people. 
She had comforted him in everything. And she, 
and the good little sisters, had so beautiful a 
faith in God, that he was sure they knew, and 
that it all would be quite well. 

He had won his Croix de Guerre and Medaille 
Militaire; they had been sent, but the officer 
had not yet come from the President of the Repub- 
lic to give them to him. It seemed very sad to 
the people of the hospital that his medals should 
not be given to him before he died. His nurse 
had been very troubled about it, and the chief 
doctor also. They had sent messages twice to 
the authorities, but no one had come. 

Then, when the queen was there the nurse 
who herself was a great lady of the world, thought 
of a beautiful thing and asked the chief doctor 
if it could not be. That the queen should give his 
decorations to the man who was dying, and that 
they should tell him, and all the others, that it 
was the queen. She knew what pleasure it 
would give him. She knew it would be like a 
dream to him, a lovely dream thing to happen to 
him, just at the end. Of course, it would not be 
official, but what did that signify — now? The 
man was dying. 

The doctor and the queen spoke together for a 
minute. 

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Journal of Small Things 

The queen had never cried for her own sorrows, 
but she had tears in her eyes then, and did not 
mind that every one saw. 

When all of those people of the hospital who 
could come were assembled in the ward, the hos- 
pital staff, and all of the wounded who could 
walk or be carried, the doctor told them, very 
simply, his voice a little hoarse, that it was the 

Queen of who was there among them, and 

that she was going to give his decorations to 
their comrade. A thrill passed through all the 
ward as the doctor's voice dropped into silence. 
No one spoke at all. 

The little soldier who was to be so honoured 
turned his head and looked at the queen. 

She was crying very much, but she smiled, and 
said to him, "You see, my little one, I cry be- 
cause it is so great an honour for me that I may 
give his decorations to a soldier of France." She 
would not have him know that she cried be- 
cause he was dying. She smiled down at him. 

Then she took his papers from the doctor 
and read his citations out aloud, quite steadily, 
to all the ward. 

She bent down over him and pinned the two 
medals on his poor nightshirt. "The honour is 
all mine," she said. 

And then she took his head between her hands, 
i8o 



The Queen 

as if he had been a child — as if he had been her 
own son who was so cruelly dead — and kissed 
his forehead. 

They say that royalty must go away out of 
the world. But how can any one say that who 
knows beautiful things? There is something so 
beautiful that belongs only to kingship, something 
of ideal and dream. It was there, in the hos- 
pital ward, when the great lady in the plain, 
almost poor, dress, her eyes full of tears, was 
honoured by the honour she might do a little 
soldier. Only a queen could have made it all 
seem so beautiful. Only a queen could have kissed 
a little soldier of the people, who really were 
her people, so quite as if he had been her child, or 
have made of kneeling by his bed for a minute 
quite so simple and proud and symbolic a thing. 

The little soldier never said one word. His eyes 
followed her with the worship that is quite differ- 
ent from any other worship, the worship that 
can be given only to a queen. 

Afterwards he said to his nurse — it was the 
only time he spoke, for in that night he died — 
**You will tell my wife, will you not? You will 
tell her all about my queen?" 



i8i 



Journal of Small Things 



Questions and Answers 

** I ^ HE wounds in the road are kept filled up. As 
-*• the road is wounded, every day, they fill the 
wounds up and smooth them over. Because, in 
case of an advance or a retreat, the way must be 
kept open and clear. 

This I have been told, for I cannot go to see. 

They tell mc how the work of the fields goes 
on around the wounds of the fields. There is no 
need, of course, to tend the wounds of the fields. 
Sometimes in the ploughing the blade of the 
plough strikes against an unexploded shell that 
the grass had hidden, and the old horse is killed, 
or the yoke of oxen, and the old peasant. 

Sometimes the soldiers, back at repose, help 
with the work of the fields. 

I ask, are the larks singing over the fields? 
But, of course. And are there magpies in the road ? 
Why, yes. 

"When a shell bursts in the fields, they say, it is 
scarcely frightful at all, the spaces are so wide. 
It seems far from you, and you think of it as just 
something of the world's — scream of wind, light- 
ning, that strikes perhaps; not an enemy thing 
at all. 

Do the bees drone on just the same in the 
182 



The Dead Town 

clover? They say they are absurd things that 
I want to know. 

But I think of the clover growing tall and sweet 
about the little tilted wooden crosses, of which 
the fields are so full; and of the bees droning 
their golden, sleepy song, there, like that. 



The Dead Town 

'T^ HEY say that the grass is growing everywhere 
-*- in the empty streets of the town. The 
streets are kept cleared of the ruins of the houses 
that fall into them, and their wounds are carefully 
healed, like the wounds of the road. The stones 
of the broken houses are piled up quite neatly at 
the edge of the streets. There is no glass left of 
the windows of those houses that still stand — 
except for that — unhurt. Many of the houses 
are terribly hurt, the roof gone, great gaps in the 
walls. 

I ask, do you see the paper of the walls in broken 
rooms? Are there pretty little wall-papers, with 
flowers and ribbons, that you see through the 
wounds of the houses? Are there left rags of 
curtain, tattered and rain-washed and faded, in 
some of the windows? Do you see people's little 
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Journal of Small Things 

loved things, abandoned in the broken ruins, be- 
trayed to strangers? 

They tell me that vines are grown across to bar 
the doors so long unopened, or the doors left so 
long open, sagging; and I suppose that there are 
cobwebs also. 

They say that here and there you see a sign 
scrawled up over a door, or over the break in a 
wall, that says, *'En cas de bombardement il y a 
iei une cave." 

I ask, is the signboard of Monsieur Pigot's, the 
pastrycook, still hung out over his door? 



The Grass Road 

"VrOU can keep on for a short distance beyond 
■■■ the town, on the other side of it. The great 
road leads on between its poplar trees, white 
and straight. Here it has been less wounded 
because the hills shelter it. The trees have not 
been hurt here; they lift their grey-green plumes, 
light and proud as ever, above the road. 

I remember to ask : Is there much passing along 
the road, that terrible grey passing of war 
things? Do you see many blue troops along 
the road? They say: Oh, yes, of course, as far 
as the old octroi. 

184 



Fifteen Days 

"What is it like now at the octroi under the 
edge of the hiin 

Just beyond the octroi there is a barbed- 
wire entanglement across the road. No one 
can go farther. There are soldiers in the yellow 
little house of the octroi. The sentinel comes 
out. 

They tell me that the road beyond the barbed- 
wire entanglement leads straight on, between 
the poplar trees, as far as any one can see, deep 
grown in grass. Nearly two years deep in grass. 
It is nearly two years since any one, yes, any one, 
has gone a step along that road. 

They tell me a thing the sentinel said, that 
is a hideous thing. I do not know why I want 
to tell it. I Imow just how he said it, with 
bitterness and irony, but as if it were a thing of 
small matter that would be soon arranged for. 

He said, "Just along there, about half-way as 
far as we can see, begins Germany." 



Fifteen Days 

rUST before the end of the world they were 

together at the chateau. 
They thought it was to have been for the last 
185 



Journal of Small Things 

time. There had been many things they needed 
to talk over and arrange together, and why not 
quietly. They were ''done with passion, pain, 
and anger." They thought to bid one another 
good-bye when everything was arranged, wishing 
one another well, and go their different ways. 

There were no children, they were hurting no 
one. They had been hurting one another too 
long, for ten years — they were both still so young 
that it seemed to them half a lifetime — and now 
they thought they would never hurt one another 
any more. It was an immense relief to each of 
them to feel that it was over, quite over, dead 
and done with. But it was not over. 

From the first moment of talk of war his one 
idea was to get himself taken for the army. 
When he was a boy, a fall in hunting had hurt 
his spine seriously; he had never been able to 
do his military service. The trouble had grown 
worse, and now, with his crooked back and halt- 
ing step, there was nothing, exactly nothing, it 
seemed, he could do. 

She stayed with him through those days of the 
utmost nervous tension. How could she leave 
him then? She understood him so well in his 
moods, now in despair, now hopeful, now in 
despair again; disgraced, he would say, worth- 
less, ashamed before his peasants, before the 

i86 



Fifteen Days 

castle servants, who were, all of them, going to 
join the colours; angry against everything, he 
had such need of her to tell it all to. He ex- 
hausted himself with hurried, futile journeys 
hither and yonder to find some one whose influence 
might get him "taken." He spent his nights 
walking the wide floors up and down, and writing 
letters to people he thought might *'do something." 
But none of it was of any use. He worried himself 
ill. He fainted twice in one day, the day the papers 
told of the taking of the first German flag. It 
was a flaming white hot day in their country of 
the Aisne. 

There were days of the passing through of their 
own troops. For days the valley was one deep, 
endlessly drawn-out trail of dust, from which 
came unceasingly the turmoil of hoofs and wheels 
and men's shouting, the horns and rush of motors, 
bugle-calls, the hot beating of drums. 

Night after night the village took in the men 
billeted upon it, lodged them somehow, fed them 
somehow. The chateau received the officers, 
and did what it could for them. 

Those were days of great enthusiasm. Trains 
passed full of flowers, of men laughing and sing- 
ing. Trainloads of great dust-coloured cannon 
passed, covered with flowers. 

Claire started a canteen at the station, the 
187 



Journal of Small Things 

little country station by the river, in the fields 
of August wheat and poppies. 

Those were exalted, wonderful days for her. 
She knew how agonizing they were for Kemy, 
and she felt about him very tenderly. 

She was a beautiful, strong creature, her beauty 
and strength for years now had annoyed and 
been a grievance to him. But now he seemed 
to have need of her strength and quietness. 
She pitied him for what she meant to him in 
those days. 

But when bad news came, everything changed 
for him. 

There were so many things for him to do. He 
was maire of the village — ^the village counted on 
him, he was not useless any more. He had been 
really ill with grieving, but now that he was 
of use, he was as well as she had ever seen him 
before. All his small nervous ways fell from 
him; she did not understand him any more than 
if he had been a child grown up suddenly beyond 
her; but she was immensely pleased with him. 
She was so glad to be able to feel him stronger 
than she. It was very good to be able to turn to 
him now for help and comfort. 

Her canteen at the station served trains that 
were full of wounded. Some of the wounded 
were so bad that they had to be taken out of the 

i88 



Fifteen Days 

trains. She got a hospital arranged as well as 
she could in the chateau. For days it was so full 
that the wounded and dying lay on beds of straw 
on the floor of the great salons, not a scrap of 
linen in the chateau but was used for dressings 
and bandages. 

Then the refugees from the villages of the 
north and the east began to pour through, telling 
of ghastly things. And then came the troops 
in retreat. 

The hospital had to be evacuated in dreadful 
haste. It was more dreadful than anything she 
had ever imagined. There was a day when the 
old town-crier went through the streets, beating 
a drum, and calling out the warning to evacuate. 
All the people who could do so fled. They 
fled, and left everything they possessed behind 
them. 

It was said that when the troops were passed, 
the bridge at the bend of the river must be blown 
up after them, and so the village would be cut off 
and left to the enemy. 

Eemy made the villagers give him the keys of 
their houses, and he put up a notice in the Grand' 
Place that any one wishing to enter the houses 
must apply for the keys to the chateau; he wrote 
the notice in German. 

Claire was proud that he did not suggest that 
189 



Journal of Small Things 

slie should go aAvay, that he took for granted she 
was at least as strong as he. 

The explosion of the blowing up of the old 
bridge was like the final note of all the things 
that used to be. The dust of the valley settled 
down for an hour, and things seemed strangely 
quiet. 

All the people of the village who had not 
been able to get away came to the chateau, 
the very old people and the sick, and some women 
with babies, begging shelter for the night. 

Three wounded men, whom it had been impos- 
sible to remove, were left behind in the great Salle 
des Miroirs. Claire was with them all night. The 
cure had stayed, and the sage-femme of the 
village had also remained to help her; the doctor 
and the chemist were both fled. 

One of the men died in the night. 

Another, who was delirious, kept singing all 
the time, "Aupres de ma Blonde." 

It frightened Claire. There was a moment 
when she was uncontrollably afraid. She was 
afraid, not of the things that were coming to pass, 
but with a nightmare panic of the wounded man, 
singing, "Aupres de ma Blonde." 

She could not bear it. She rushed in desperate 
panic to find Remy. 

It was in the moment before dawn; the birds 
190 



Fifteen Days 

in the garden and park were waking; the halls 
and stairs were still dark. She thought she never 
would find him; then she thought he must be 
in the kitchen, where the village people were 
huddled together. 

She found him there, talking to them quietly. 

There was a girl who had St. Vitus dance; 
she sat by the big kitchen table, one of her hands, 
that would not keep still, thumping and thumping 
the table. Claire was afraid to go into the 
kitchen. 

Kemy came out into the passage to her, and 
shut the kitchen door behind him. 

The lamp was still burning in the passage. 

She caught his hands; and suddenly she had 
buried her face in his shoulder and was crying. 

"There, there," he said, patting her hair. 

She sobbed, clinging to him. 

"You have been so brave," he said, "poor 
child." 

She could have cried for a long time with his 
arms around her. 

But he said, "You must not let them find you 
like this, you know; they might think you were 
afraid. ' ' 

They came, very shortly after. 

There was a galloping of hoofs into the chateau 
courts, and a shouting. 

191 



Journal of Small Things 

Then came the mass of them, surging into the 
court, greenish-yellow, with their loud, snarling 
voices. 

Claire saw them from the windows over the 
court; Remy had gone down to meet them. 

She came down to the great central hall, not 
afraid any more. She had dressed carefully, 
and arranged her hair specially well. Tall and 
fine, she came slowly down the curving stair- 
case, and stopped half-way to look on what was 
passing below. 

The German officers seemed to her to be all 
gigantic creatures; Remy looked more than ever 
small and frail among them. They were com- 
manding, this way and that, roughly. Remy 
stood silent, watching them. His look was so 
high and cool, so proud in the bitterness of the 
moment, that she drew herself up with pride 
in him. 

The colonel was speaking with him, and 
moved toward the door of the Salle des Miroirs. 
Remy stepped before him. "Not there," he said, 
"two men are dying in that room." 

Claire came down into the hall and crossed 
between the officers and went to stand beside 
her husband. She was very proud to stand 
beside him. Something in her bearing seemed 
to carry weight with the officers; they drew back, 

192 



Fifteen Days 

less insistent before her, from the door of the 
Salle des Miroirs. 

Again and again, in the fifteen days that 
followed, she felt that same effect of her presence 
upon them, and knew that it was a help to Remy. 

In the fifteen days he and she had opportunity 
for very few words together, the Germans always 
watching them suspiciously. 

All the days were full of confusion; Remy was 
kept constantly about with the German officers 
to arrange for the billeting of the men in the 
village, the stabling of horses and motors, inter- 
preting, explaining. No one but he could get 
the frightened people, the few there were of them 
remaining, to go back to their houses and do the 
things required of them. No one but he could 
protect them, and at the same time see to it 
that they gave no offence. The least rousing 
of the Germans' anger would, he knew, have to 
be paid for dreadfully. Their demands were 
made at the point of the bayonet. They were 
angry because the bridge had been destroyed, 
and only Remy's cool, quiet strength of insistence 
kept them from carrying out the threat to burn 
the village in reprisal. To hold his own, the 
while obeying as he must obey, yielding this 
point and that, submitting, and yet faithfully 
defending all that depended on him, was no easy 
193 



Journal of Small Things 

matter of accomplishment. He must keep faith 
and dignity, and yet he must not give offence. 

There were very desperate moments when 
the Germans would be asking for information, 
about the telephones and telegraphs, and about 
the country, the roads, and the marble quarries, 
the rebuilding of the bridge. Such help he could 
not give them, and there were moments when his 
refusal to talk, like his refusal to take a cigarette, 
risked everything. 

Claire came to have a special dread of the 
colonel's fat leather cigarette-case. Remy must 
wave it aside saying, so that his meaning was quite 
clear and yet courteous, that he had given up 
smoking for the time. The little scene of it was 
repeated night after night. 

At first the Germans would have him always 
stand up in their presence. They would send 
for him while they dined, and have him stand 
there while they questioned and commanded. 
Then they realized that it was his wish to 
stand, that few things would have been more 
hateful for him than to have sat down with 
them. 

After that they would have him and Claire 

dine with them. They sent for Claire to come 

down to the dining-room, where they were already 

seated at table and Remy was standing. She 

194 



Fifteen Days 

must sit on the colonel's right, and drink a glass 
of champagne with him. 

One of the officers called to her down the 
table, "There is yet left many a toast we can 
drink together, the brave and the fair!" 

She thought that Remy's fury would get the 
better of him, and she spoke quickly, before he 
could speak. She moved quickly between him 
and the colonel. 

The colonel, sitting at the head of the table, 
under the portraits of generations of Remy's 
people, glared up at her as she stood, very tall. 

"You will do as I command you, madame," 
he said. 

There seemed to be no escape. Desperately 
chancing it, she said, "But you will not stoop 
to command so idly. You know that we have 
no help but to obey you. Of what value could 
be forced obedience to you in so petty a thing? 
I know you will not command a thing so trivial 
and poor." 

And he did not ask it of them. 

Her days as well as Eemy's were crowded. 
The Germans required so many things, and there 
was no one left to serve them. She had only a 
few peasant servants to help her. The Germans 
demanded food, and there was scarcely anything 
to give them. Very little could be got in the 
195 



Journal of Small Things 

emptied village; there was no more meat or 
bread. These people must eat, or they would 
become ugly. She must manage it somehow. She 
had to get the bakery started again, and make 
the villagers understand that they must give 
what they had in their little gardens, and their 
chickens and the rabbits. Old Jantot at the 
castle was quite unable to do the work of the 
kitchen-gardens and dairies. She worked hard 
helping him. 

All the day of the arrival of the Germans she 
had been pitching hay from the stable loft to 
make bedding for the men quartered there; she 
scarcely left her work that day, except to go to 
the funeral of the soldier who had died in the 
Salle des Miroirs. 

The cure helped old Jantot to carry him, and 
she followed them out through the courts, and 
past the German guard. 

The two other wounded men in the Salle des 
Miroirs died while the strange alien life of the 
chateau went on. Three or four people of the 
village were ill; one woman and her newly 
bom child died; there was no one but Claire to 
help the sage-femme. 

The Germans accused the old cure of signalling 
from the church tower. They took him into 
the market-place, with a rope tied round his 
196 



Fifteen Days 

neck, to hang him, they said, under the plane- 
tree by the fountain. Remy stood by him, 
risking everything to make them delay a few 
minutes. 

Claire found the colonel; she never could 
remember what she said, how she pleaded. But 
the colonel said, "If we find these things true 
against him, then it will be your hu,sband who 
will hang for it. ' ' 

In one of the rare moments when they were 
alone together, Eemy said something which gave 
her more pleasure to hear than anything that 
had ever been told her before. He told her 
that but for her he did not think he could possibly 
endure it, that only her presence there, so brave 
and strong, the one thing left in the world, gave 
him strength to go on. 

He had come up to her room, a small tower 
room she had withdrawn to when the Germans 
arrived. It was late in the evening, the room 
was almost dark, and she had lighted two candles 
on the little table, by the window, where she was 
having bread and soup on a tray. He had had 
scarcely anything to eat all day, and she made him 
share the soup and the bread. They laughed 
because he was really hungry. Cut off from the 
world, completely alone together in the most 
intense isolation, having no one, nothing, left, 
197 



Journal of Small Things 

either of them, but each the other, in a world 
terrible beyond belief, they laughed together 
because he was so absurdly hungry. 

They knew nothing but what the Germans told 
them of things that were happening in the 
world. 

How could they believe such things? They 
did not believe, and yet to hear them said ! 

Fifteen days passed, that they could not have 
lived through if there had not been so much for 
them to do in every moment, and if they had 
not had each of them the comfort and support 
of the other's presence. Fifteen days passed, 
of helplessness and dread, almost despair. 

Then, in one day, something was changed 
for the Germans; there was no knowing what 
it was ; their mood took on a new ugliness. 

It was that day that some of the men hanged 
Claire's St. Bernard puppy. They hanged him 
on the terrace from the branch of the big chestnut 
tree and left him there. Claire came up through 
the park from the village and found him. They 
never knew why the men had done it; it seemed 
so small and useless a thing to have done. 

For two days she and Remy were kept as 

prisoners, allowed to leave their rooms only 

attended by a soldier, and not to go to the village 

at all. There seemed to be a great confusion 

198 



Fifteen Days 

and commotion in the village and in the castle, 
but no explanation was given them. 

Then, in one night, the Germans were gone. 

Village and castle were left empty for scarcely 
a morning, and then came French troops, in 
hot pursuit from the victory of the Marne. 

From the victory of the Marne — there had 
been a victory, a great victory! What a thing 
to hear, after their almost hopeless days! Hope- 
lessness had been so black and close about them. 
And now it was lifted, dispersed, in a moment, 
by a word. Here come their own people crying 
victory. In their own tongue, their own men, 
dressed in blue, told them of victory. 

Those things the Germans had said were not 
true. They had never believed, but now they 
knew. To think of looking into the faces of 
friends, of talking with friends! The humblest 
little soldier was a friend, the most wonderful 
of all things. 

Eemy, who had all his life been distant and 
cold, was inexpressibly happy to wring a friend's 
hand, and sit with him, or pace the floor with 
him, and smoke with him. 

What a pleasure to give all one had to friends! 

How happy Claire was to help scrub and cook 
for friends ! 

It was a madness of relief and joy. 
199 



Journal of Small Things 

There was little time for thinking about it 
though. The new possession of the chateau 
was a desperately risky thing. 

But these were friends, to suffer with and die 
with, if need be. Nothing could be as terrible 
as in those past days of isolation among 
enemies. Among friends they met what came. 

In a few hours death and destruction were upon 
everything. And then, day after day, day after 
day, the battle raged along the river and under 
the edge of the hills; the sound of the cannon 
grew to be a familiar part of the nights and days ; 
the screech of a shell was no longer strange. 

The Germans had withdrawn to the strongholds 
of the marble quarries, just above the village. 
The village was crossed by the two fires. The 
poor people were killed in their little houses. 

Men who went up on the chateau roofs to re- 
connoitre, were brought back dead. An officer 
was killed by a shell on the terrace, under the big 
chestnut tree. 

Claire had to leave her tower room, and next 
day it had fallen with all the roofs of the east 
wing of the castle. Two men were killed in the 
fall of the east wing roofs, and the chestnut 
tree of the terrace, that had shaded generations 
of pleasant dreaming, was struck down under 
falling of tiles and stone. 
200 



Fifteen Days 

They established the staff of the Etat-Major 
for greater safety in the cellars. 

More than half the village was destroyed in 
those days. Claire and her husband lodged the 
homeless people as best they could in the dairy, 
the ground floor of the chateau was already 
crowded with the officers, and the stables and 
farm-buildings with the men. 

For Eemy and Claire there was left one room, 
not too exposed, on the first floor. 

From the window of it, together, one night, 
they watched the burning of a village over across 
the valley. It was a village of nearly all thatched 
roofs: it must have caught fire from the shells, 
and in that one night it was burnt to the ground. 

As she and Eemy stood in the window, with 
nothing left about them but ruin and death, 
she remembered how, just before all this, they 
had thought they were come to the end of their 
life together; they had thought they were no- 
thing to one another any more. And then 
suddenly they had come to be everji;hing to 
each other. How could they either of them 
have borne it without the other? 

Now their intense, their desperate solitude, 

together, was at an end. Others had come to 

share with them the burden of these things. 

There were others to whom they could turn now 

201 



Journal of Small Things 

for comradeship. All of it was horrible, but now 
the world was again about them, life was opening 
its ways again. 

She wondered, standing there by him, if, 
when some day the dreadful sounds of war were 
ceased and there was given them a chance to take 
up what they might of life again and go on with 
it — would they go on with it together? She 
wondered if he knew of what she was thinking as 
they stood there side by side? They had now 
become used to feeling one another's thoughts. 

She was thinking that surely, after this, what- 
ever happened they would have to go on with it 
together? They had gone through too much 
together ever again to break away. She would 
not have it otherwise, oh, not for all the world 
would she have had it otherwise. But she was 
wondering, if the great need passed, and life 
became small again, would they be changed 
enough? Would all this they had gone through 
have given them greatness enough to face, down 
length of days, the little things together? 

Hospital, Monday, June 12th 

WE never see them well. As soon as they 
are better at all they send them down- 
stairs to the convalescent ward, and from 
202 



Hospital, Monday, June 12th 

there they are marked for other hospitals, and 
in a day or two, one morning, I come to find them 
gone. The men who were evacuated at the be- 
ginning of Verdun did not even make the halt 
of the ward downstairs. And now those first 
Verdun men are gone, all but the very worst 
of them, to make place for men from, we don't 
know where. 

The boy with the almond-shaped eyes is one of 
those who are left. He was much better for days, 
and now he has gone down again. He is tuber- 
culous, and that is why he never will get well. 
He lies sunk down in the bed, a very small heap 
with closed eyes and one cheek always bright red. 
His father and mother have come up from the 
country, from somewhere in Normandj^; they 
sit together beside his bed and look at him. His 
mother wears a dress of the richest black silk, 
that must have been the gala dress of her family 
for two or three generations, and a cap of lace 
that the smartest lady in Paris would be proud 
of. His father wears a black satni Sunday 
smock, of which the yoke is embroidered wonder- 
fully. They have dressed themselves in their 
very best to come and sit by their boy, who 
scarcely notices them. 

I like to think how happily the new Number 
4 — we call them all new since Verdun began — 
203 



Journal of Small Things 

went off, with his one leg. He will have a 
wooden stick leg and be able to get about 
splendidly in his meadows of the High Loire. 
To-day he showed me a little photograph of his 
wife, in close-bound muslin cap and folded necker- 
chief. Her face is like the face of the Madonna 
in the simple calm pure paintings of the old 
masters. I said, "She is perfectly beautiful." 
He said, "Oh, no, madame, she is only a peasant, 
and not young. It is not even a good photograph. 
And it is all cracked and rubbed, madame sees, 
because I have worn it all the time of the war, 
sewn in my coat." 

Little Charles is always left — poor little 
Charles, well used to the confusion of departures 
and arrivals. 

As I was leaving to-day at noon, the mother 
and father of the boy with the almond-shaped 
eyes got up from beside his bed and stopped 
me. The father, who has almond-shaped eyes 
too, asked if they might have a word with me 
when no one could hear. Their gala finery 
made them the more pathetic, confused, and 
timid, strangers in such strange times and 
place. 

"We went out into the corridor, the three of 
us, and stood by the door of Madame Bayle's 
linen-room. 

204 



Saturday, June 24th 

The father asked me, whispering, if I thought 
that the people of the hospital were fond of the 
boy? He said that he and the mother were 
obliged to go back that night to the farm, and 
did I think that these people they must leave 
their boy with were fond of him? 



Saturday, June 24th 

^ I ^HE boy with the almond-shaped eyes is dead. 
-*- He died day before yesterday. I have been 
ill and not at the hospital these days, and I did 
not know. I went back to the hospital only 
this afternoon. 

His father and mother arrived too late, this 
morning. They had had scarcely time to reach 
the farm in Normandy, when one of the house 
doctors, a kind man, wrote to tell them to come 
back. At the bureau they made a mistake in 
the address they gave the doctor, and his letter 
was returned to him in the post the day before 
the boy died. The doctor telegraphed then, but 
it was too late. 

I do not know who told the father and mother 

when they came this morning. I do not know 

where they are today — this day so terrible for 

them in the great strange city. I would have 

205 



Journal of Small Things 

liked to find them. Madame Marthe says they 
were surely allowed to go and see their boy, where 
he is, but not to stay with him. 

I think of them, peasant people, confused and 
strange in city streets, frightened, belonging to 
no one, terribly alone, with nowhere to go in 
their grief. Where are they gone in their grief? 
They, to whom nothing has ever been explained, 
who are so unable to tell or to ask. 



Sunday, June 25th 

WAS going to the chapel with my flowers, 
but I met Madame Marthe in the archway of 
our court, and she told me it was not there that 
I would find him. We went together around 
behind the chapel and past buildings that I had 
never seen before, of the immense world of the 
hospital. What a dreadful world in this June 
sunshiny morning! 

A steep, dusty road goes up past outbuildings 
of the hospital, workshops, and yards, where 
there were some green things growing, and at the 
top there were a lot of our soldiers waiting at the 
door of a low, long house. My poor little hobbling, 
lopsided blue soldiers, with their bandages and 
206 



Sunday, June 25th 

slings and canes and crutches! I think they 
are so beautiful. 

The doors of the house were open. Up two 
steps, and there were the father and mother, 
in their black silk and satin, standing beside 
the boy. They were perfectly quiet. The strange 
thing about the grief one sees in these days, 
everywhere, is that always it is so perfectly 
quiet. The boy looked just as one had seen him 
80 often, sleeping, with his almond eyes closed. 
Only there was no fever in his cheeks any more. 

The black hearse came up the road with several 
croquemorts and eight Republican Guards; they 
had two crossed palms for the boy, and the flag 
to cover him, and the black wooden cross that 
was to mark his grave. 

We followed down the road anu. across the 
courts and out of the hospital gates. 

The Sunday morning market was busy and 
noisy outside in the street, but a silence seemed 
to form itself around us as we went between the 
barrows and booths of summer country things. 
Then we went along a wide avenue that was 
empty, where the sound of the wheels of the hearse 
and of the horses' hoofs seemed solemn and 
monotonous, and as if it were something that 
never would cease. The boy's father and mother 
trudged ahead sturdily, with the st"^ong gait of 
207 



Journal of Small Things 

peasants from the fields, and my wounded dragged 
alon^, already tired. It was a long way from 
the hospital to the church. 

There were many people in the street of the 
church, and on the church steps, and the church 
inside was crowded. It is the church of an ir- 
religious quarter, but it was crowded. 

A big Suisse with his mace led us along the 
aisle, through the throng of people who stood 
back from us, to the chapel of Our Lady, behind 
the high altar. Many of the Suisses of the 
churches of this quarter are gendarmes, needed 
because the roughs who come into the church 
would often make disturbance. The big Suisse 
had the air of a gendarme, ordering us. 

But now the boy's mother and father were 
in a place they understood. There was no need 
to order them. They knew just what to do. 
They had been uncertain elsewhere, timid and 
bewildered, in the hospital, in the streets, but 
in the church they were at home. 

The boy's mother motioned me into a chair 
behind hers. She and I were the only women: 
Madame Marthe had had to go back to her work 
in the ward. I knelt where she told me to kneel. 
The boy's father helped the wounded into the 
chairs across the chapel aisle from us, and took his 
place in front of them. In the aisle, between his 
208 



Sunday, June 25th 

father and mother, the boy had his four lighted 
tapers and his crossed palms and the flag of his 
country. 

The priest who said the office was old, and 
fumbled and murmured. I was glad that he 
was slow. It gave a longer time for the father 
and mother to rest and be comforted. 

The Suisse was rather in a hurry at the end of 
it, perhaps there was another funeral waiting. 
He would have had us follow the priest out 
quickly. 

But the boy's mother would stop to kneel 
by the boy for a little moment, there before 
the altar of the Blessed Virgin. The boy's father 
came and knelt also, on the floor of the aisle. 

Two calm figures, they knelt there, the Suisse 
could not hurry them. Those who would have 
carried their boy away stood and waited. We 
stood back and waited. The stir up and down of 
people outside the chapel gates went on, and all 
the stirs of the church and the streets and the 
world. 

The two calm figures knelt, for the moment 
they were, with their sorrow, at peace; not 
strangers here, but at home in the house of that 
which did not confuse or frighten them. 



209 



Journal of Small Things 



The Stain 

' I ^HE maid, who had been Giselle's nurse so 

•*• short a time ago, opened the library door and 

announced, unwillingly, one could see, ** Madame 

la Marquise de St. Agnan, Madame la Comtesse." 

Giselle, in her heavy mourning, stood up from 
the chair by the window. She did not go forward 
to meet Paule. 

"It is sweet of you to see me," said Paule, 
crossing the room to her, slender and tall and 
lovely. 

The baby-boy and girl who had been playing 
with some wooden toy soldiers on the floor in a 
corner, both scrambled up and trotted over to 
their mother. 

Paule had never seen them before. She wanted 
to take them both in her arms and hold them 
tight. She thought she could never have let 
the boy go. 

But Giselle said to the maid, "Honorine, please 
take the children to Miss." 

They went out with the old woman, who closed 
the door. 

"It was very sweet of you to let me come," 
repeated Paule, because she had to say something. 
It was harder than she had thought possible. 

2IO 



The Stain 

"I have seen no one at all," said Giselle. "But 
your letter — I don't know — I wondered " 

They stood looking at one another. Of course, 
they did not touch one another's hands. 

Suddenly the room seemed to swim about 
Paule, there was a surging in her ears. She said, 
"May I sit down?" 

"But I beg you! I am sorry, I can't seem 
to think of things. Here in the window?" 

Paule dragged the chair out of the light of the 
sunshiny June morning into the shadow of the 
curtain. She was wearing a heavy white lace 
veil, but she did not want to face the sunshine. 

Giselle threw herself into the chair where she 
had been sitting before. Her crape and the 
traces of many tears upon her face only made 
her look the more pathetically young. 

"You wondered," said Paule, "if my letter 
were true, really; if it were possible that I could 
honestly write like that of him?" 

Giselle nodded her head, not speaking. 

Paule saw that it would not have been possible 
for her to speak. She saw, what she had been 
sure she would see, that the younger woman was 
suffering intensely. She realized, more than ever 
what the thing meant to her Bernard's wife; 
how for her everything of her memory of him, the 
memory she was to keep with her all her life, 

211 



Journal of Small Things 

depended on what she was to learn in this hour. 
All the memory she was to keep of her dead hus- 
band depended on it. That she might remember 
him with tenderness and solace and peace ; or that 
it must be always with uncertainty and restlessness, 
and bitter thoughts. To be able to mourn him 
fully, fearlessly; or to go on always tormenting 
herself with doubt. It was of desperate im- 
portance to her. Paule saw that. She knew 
that the younger woman kept silent because she 
could not speak, not because of any realization 
she had of the advantage silence gave her. 

Giselle, silent, waited. 

The older woman, braving the silence, took the 
thing up. 

"You are going to believe what I tell you. I 
don't know why you should believe me, but you 
will. They all talk of it, but I am the only one 
who really knows. And I have got to tell you. 
The things they say are true, but with such a 
difference. I must make you understand the 
difference. Since the moment Dolly told me 
that you knew, I have known that I must make 
you understand. I cannot let you misunderstand 
him when he is dead." 

She was holding her parasol across her knees, 
her hands in their soft tan gloves clutching the two 
ends of it very tight. 

212 



The Stain 

"It is rather terribly hard for me to tell you," 
she said, ''harder even than for you to listen. 
Remember that, if I seem to go over it cruelly." 
She stopped, and Giselle nodded again. 

"I must go over it," Paule went on, speaking 
very fast now, *'so that we can have it all clear 
between us. Don't you see? He came home 
here for six days' leave. He told you he had 
six days' leave. When he went, at the end of 
those six days, you thought it was back to the 
front he was gone. Then, three days after 
lie left you, he was killed in a bayonet charge. 
And his colonel, and some of his friends, said, 
writing to you and to other people of him, that 
it was especially sad to think he had been killed 
the very day Tie came hack from Ms leave. So 
you knew that his leave had been of eight days, 
that he had had two days' extra leave of which 
he had not told you, spent, you did not know 
where, or with whom. And then it happened 
Dolly spoke to you of seeing him with me in 
Evreux the very day before he was killed. And 
so you knew. She had spoken of it to lots of people 
— the way people always say, you know, 'and I 
saw him only the day before.' And so every 
one knew. And you knew. But I have got to 
make you understand." 

She let go her parasol and, leaning forward 
213 



Journal of Small Things 

into the sunshine, threw her veil back from 
her face with her two hands. *'I will let you 
see how I have suffered," she said, "it is 
written for you in my face." She was glad to 
have the younger v/oman sec how much of her 
beauty was gone. "And that I loved him. You 
know — I must let you know — ^that I loved him. 
I loved him when you were a little schoolroom 
girl. And he did love me then." She drew 
herself up with a sudden flaming of pride. "I 
will give myself the comfort of saying that he 
loved me before he knew you, Giselle." The 
flame died down instantly, and she leaned forward, 
almost beseechingly. The parasol had fallen to 
the floor. "But he never loved me afterwards. 
From the moment he saw you — I was with him 
at somebody's dance the first time he saw you — 
I knew that for me everything was finished. 
Everything was swept away by his love of you. 
You know that, don't you?" 

"I believed it then," said Giselle, speaking at 
last, "then, and all the time, in spite of all the 
things that people said, until this." 

"There was one thing I never let go," Paule 
went on; "it was the pitying, protecting tender- 
ness a man who is good like Bernard always 
continues to feel for the woman he once loved 
and who goes on loving him. I kept that alive, 
214 



The Stain 

I kept him being sorry for me. There's reason 
enough in my life for any one to be sorry for me. 
And I kept him feeling that he must protect me, 
protect me from the blackness of sorrow that, 
I let him know always, there was in my heart." 

Giselle had turned from her, as if she could not 
look at her, and sat staring out of the window 
to the tops of the trees in the avenue. Her 
cheeks were burning, as if the shame of the 
miserable confession were her own. 

"Do j^ou not see, oh, do you not see?" begged 
the other woman. 

There was a dreadful silence. 

Paule took it up again. "And the last thing 
was the accumulation of the shame and misery 
of years. I wish I could make you see, a little, 
what it meant to me, that you might not quite 
despise me. I suppose there is no excuse. But 
it had been so dreadful, down there in 
the country, with my husband, as he is, 
you know, ill, needing me, hating me, 
wanting me every moment. And all these 
terrible months of war, nearly two years, never' 
seeing Bernard, scarcely hearing of him. I 
made him come. I made him come by telling 
him that I was in desperate trouble, that if he did 
not come I could not face it. I told him he must 
tell no one, not even you: that my trouble was 
215 



Journal of Small Things 

a tiling I must keep secret. Against his will, just 
by abuse of his kindness I made him give me 
those two days. I want you to quite, quite 
understand that it was only that I loved him, that 
he loved you. And that those two days were my 
theft of time he wanted to give all to you." 

"Oh, don't, don't!" cried Giselle, breaking 
into it. "You need not tell me any more." 
She covered her face with her hands, as if it 
were she who was ashamed. 

"Some day you will wonder why I have told 
you," Paule said, "why any woman should so 
humiliate herself down to the dust. It is 
because you have the right to a beautiful memory 
of him. You must keep that beautiful memory 
of him for yourself and for his children. It 
belongs to you, and to his home, and to his 
children. Never doubt him, Giselle, and let your 
sorrow be a beautiful sorrow, because he loved 
you as you loved him, perfectly. And in death 
he is yours. That is all." 

She stopped and picked up her parasol. It was 
a green parasol. She looked from its bright 
colour to Giselle's black dress. She shivered a 
little and stood up. 

Giselle took her hands away from her eyes 
and stood up, too. 

Paule would have turned and gone out of the 
216 



The Stain 

room, but Giselle caught her hands and held her, 
and lifted up her young face from which the 
tortured look was gone. She was crying, but 
tenderly. 

For an instant it seemed as if Paule would 
have drawn away from her. But then she bent 
from her lovely height and kissed the younger 
woman. Then she went away. 

Giselle did not go to the door with her. Old 
Honorine let her out of the apartment. 

She went down, the stairs and out into the 
avenue, where the leaves of the trees made large 
shadows. 

As she walked very wearily, she did not know 
where, she was telling herself that it was over, 
that she had done what she could. She had 
made poor little Giselle believe her. She had 
given him to Giselle. 

The avenue ahead of her seemed very, very 
long. She wondered if she would ever get to the 
end of it. Her thoughts seemed confused. She 
wondered what there was so cruel about Giselle's 
black dress and her own green parasol with the 
parrot handle. She would manage somehow to 
make the world believe that story she had told 
Giselle. She had given him to Giselle to mourn 
for. Perhaps that would wipe out some of it. 



?i2 



Journal of Small Things 



From Verdun 

T T E was grown so used to his mud-hole, and 
^ -*■ the straw, and the mushrooms, and rats, 
that when he was come into the salon of the 
house in the Pare Monecau, and the butler he 
never had seen before had closed the door 
behind him saying, in odd French, that he would 
go and tell Madame la Comtesse, he just stood 
there in the middle of the room and laughed. He 
stood there, just as he had come out of the 
trenches, a most disreputable figure that once 
had been blue, and laughed to think that it was 
to this, all this, he really belonged. This was 
his house, and his wife would be coming in a 
moment into the room. 

The room smelled of sandal-wood and amber. 
Things in it were of black lacquer and mauve 
velvet and dull gold. There were lots of books 
about on low tables, and Dolly's gold and 
amber cigarette things, and white roses, just the 
heads broken off, floating in flat bowls of smoky 
jade. How like Dolly to have cut off the long 
stems of the roses and their lovely thorns and 
leaves! He really must not laugh. There was 
one flame-red vase with a white spirit orchid in it. 

Then Dolly came in, as fragile and pale and 
218 



From Verdun 

lovely as the orchid. It was ten months since 
he had seen her. How delightfully her hair was 
done, and her fingers, rose-tipped like sea-shells! 
She came to him, her flower-face lifted. 

He said, ' ' Oh, my dear, I am so dirty. ' ' 

Some one had followed her into the room, a 
woman in deep mourning. It was the little 
Juriac, Lisette de Juriac, and she was quite 
unchanged. Not even her heavy crape changed 
her. How was it possible that she was not 
changed? How could she still be beautiful? 

She came forward saying, "I was here with 
Dolly; I could not go, and not see you. I must 
stop just a moment to speak to you." 

He took her hand and held it, and did not 
know what to say to her. He was seeing again 
that which he had seen not six weeks ago. He 
had seen many men die horribly, horribly. But 
if he thought too much of how his friend, her 
husband, had died, kept too vividly, too long, 
seeing it, he would go mad. Why was she not 
gone mad? She had loved her husband, who 
had loved her. They had been happy to- 
gether. 

He had a sudden hatred of her because she was 
not gone mad. Because there was some becom- 
ing white thing about her face to soften the 
harshness of the crape, and because there were 
219 



Journal of Small Things 

pearls around her throat; he had a crazy desire 
to take her, his two hands clutching her shoulders, 
and tell her how Eene died, tell her the horror, 
burnt, burnt, burnt, make her see what he could 
not stop seeing. Because of the white frill and 
the pearls, he wanted to make her see it and feel 
it, and go down crushed under the realization of it. 
He would have made her ugly, as suffering 
makes ugly. When she was ugly he would believe 
she suffered. He could not move or speak, for 
he would have seized her and told her. 

She was saying, "You were with him in the 
attack, you saw him fall, and you went back 
and tried to save him." She had her black 
gloves and parasol in her hand, and a little black 
bag, soft, like the gloves. She was trying to 
open the little black bag to get something out of 
it. She was beginning to cry. 

Dolly, saying, ''Poor dear, poor dear," took 
the gloves and parasol from her and found a 
scrap of a handkerchief for her in the bag. "Poor 
dear, poor dear." She put her arm around 
Lisette and patted her eyes with the tiny hand- 
kerchief. "Darling, it was a glorious death, you 
know, like that, in action, beautiful, the death 
he would have chosen. Jacques, tell her." 

Tell her? He was trying not to tell her. He 
stood there looking at his friend's wife and trying 

220 



From Verdun 

not to tell her of the hands that had moved and 
moved, beating and beating the air. 

"Tell her how fearless he was," Dolly was 
saying, *'and how proud she must be of 
him." 

Oh, yes, there was that. He thought of the 
words they always use. He said, "He died for 
his country." 

She was crying only a little, but with really 
piteous tears. He knew that after a while, when 
he was himself a little farther from it, he would 
be sorry for her. Her dimpled chin quivered 
and her throat throbbed under the pearls. She 
looked at him, her eyes big with tears, and, half 
sobbing, said, "You were with him just before 
the attack, the last to speak with him." 

"Yes, we were together." 

She was waiting for him to tell her something. 
But there was nothing to tell her. He had again 
that other eraziness. Now he was afraid that 
he would laugh. They had been crouching 
behind a heap of dead men, in the terrible dusk 
of cannon smoke and the noise that never ceased. 
He remembered they had been eating something. 
There had risen a wild, strange shriek through 
the noise of the cannon, and they had leaped up, 
had shrieked, and been over the sandbags. 

Lisette was waiting, and while he tried to 

221 



Journal of Small Things 

think, she said, "Was he speaking of me? Were 
his last words for me?" 

"He was always thinking of yon, I know, 
Lisette." That he could say eagerly, intensely — 
only why need she have it put into words? "You 
were his whole life, Lisette." 

She lifted her head with a quite perfect gesture, 
and smiled, her eyes bright, the tears gone from 
them. "I was his whole life," she said, "and he 
died for his country. ' ' There was no more sob in her 
voice. She said, "He was so young and splendid, 
and he had always been so happy. He had so 
much to live for. He gave up so much with his 
life for his country. He leaves such a beautiful 
memory. I can say, 'His life was the woman 
who loved him, and for his country he died.' It 
is beautiful. That is the only comfort of it all, 
that it is beautiful." She broke off and began 
again, "I'm glad I saw you, Jacques, you have 
helped me, I'm so unhappy." She put the little 
handkerchief back in the bag, and took up her 
gloves and parasol. "Now I will leave you," 
she said. "Poor boy, you must be too tired to 
talk. How wonderful for Dolly to have you! 
Perhaps you will come with her to-morrow — 
they have persuaded me to lend my ballroom for 
just a little music for the blind. Dolly dear, 
you'll not fail me? You know I count on you 

222 



From Verdun 

to look after people. I am going to hide away 
in some little corner. Isn't it strange," she said 
to Jacques, "how life goes on?" 

Dolly and he went to the door with her. There 
was no one in the big hall. 

Dolly said, ''That man is really too stupid." 

Lisette said, ''You are lucky to have a man- 
servant at all. ' * 

"What a lovely sunset!" said Dolly in the 
open door. 

"Yes," said Lisette, "isn't it?" 

"Your car is there?" 

"Yes; good-bye, Dolly darling; good-bye, 
Jacques, and thank you." 

As they turned back from the door, Dolly 
said, "Poor little thing, isn't she lovely in her 
mourning ? ' ' 

She put her arm through his as they went 
across the hall together. "I'm so glad to have 
you, Jacques," she said, "you can't imagine, and 
I'm so proud of you. You don't forget me there, 
Jacques ; you love me just as you always did ? ' ' 

He was thinking. Six days' leave, perhaps two 
days extended. In nine days Dolly might be 
wearing a little white frill inside a veil of heavy- 
crape, and just her pearls. And she would say 
to people that he had been all her life, and that 
it was the death he would have chosen. And in 
223 



Journal of Small Things 

six weeks she would let the salon be used for 
just a little music for the blind. 

"Do you know," she said as they went up 
the stairs together, "it was most beautiful, that 
thing Lisette said, her little summing up of it: 
'His whole life was the woman who loved him, 
and for his country he died.' It made me think, 
you know, of Dante, those four lines of Pia del 
Tolomei. ' ' 

At the top of the stairs she turned to him, a 
step or two above him, standing higher than he. 
"Look at me, Jacques, and tell me I have not 
changed, and that you love me. What are you 
laughing at?" 

"Nothing." He came up the steps and took 
her hands, and kissed the fingers of first one 
hand then the other. "These' last weeks I have 
been always laughing; you must not mind. And, 
dear, I'm so glad you do your hair like that, and 
remember things from Dante, and play with the 
tips of roses, and that you do not understand." 



Sunday, July 2nd 

T AST night Paris streets heard the cannon of 

^~^ the great prelude. The breeze, that was 

fresh and sweet from the country, brought in 

224 



Sunday, July 2nd 

the sound of the cannon. In the silence of the 
night the streets listened. It was a sound regular 
and even. If Time were a great clock the sound 
of its ticking would be like that, on and on. If 
there were one great pulse that beat for all the 
life of the world, its throb would be like that, 
unceasing, relentless. It seemed like something 
that had always been, that always would be. It 
seemed as if one were used to it, had always 
been accustomed to the burden of sound that, 
the whole night through, the sweet fresh breeze 
brought in to Paris, and would have to go on 
bearing it always. 

But when the city stopped listening, and took 
up its way again with the morning, the sound of 
the battle was lost in the small immediate sounds 
of the day's life. 

In the trees I look to from my window, there 
was a great disturbance of birds, field birds and 
forest birds, driven into the city by the smoke 
and thunder that possess their land. 

My hospital is almost empty. In all the wards 
there are waiting rows of empty beds, a nightshirt 
folded on each pillow. Rows of empty beds 
waiting 



225 



Journal of Small Things 



Monday, July 3rd 

^TpHIS is a dark day, the colour of battles, for 

-*- battles are not of scarlet and gold, only dark. 

It is as if the darkness of the day and the 

darkness of the smoke of battle are terribly mingled 

together. 



Tuesday, July 4tK 

^TpHE people who went to that church were 
■^ proud, they were very proud of him, he 
had died so beautifully. Each one of them was 
proud to say, "He was my friend," or "I knew 
his people," or "I saw him once," or just, "He 
was an American. ' ' He had died for an ideal they 
all had sight of. 

It was only a memorial service. There were 
only the two flags, the flag of France and the 
Stars and Stripes, in the aisle before the altar. 
He was lying somewhere inside the enemy lines, 
as he had fallen. 

They of the air, they go so far ; and if they fall, 
it is perhaps a little more sad and lonely because 
it may be where no one of their own can go to 
226 



Wednesday, July 5th 

them. Perhaps the enemy have laid a wreath 
there on the place where he fell, as they do 
sometimes, those men of the air, to honour one 
another's memory. They say on the inscription 
of the wreaths sometimes: "To our enemy who 
died for his country." For this boy they would 
need to say another thing, ''To our enemy who 
died for his ideal." I think that we, in the 
church, were not sorry, but were glad for him, 
that we were envying him— we who only live. 



Invaded Town, Wednesday, July 5th 

'T^ 0-DAY I was shown a letter that came— I 
was not told by what means— from one of 
the invaded towns of the North. It was the 
letter of a girl who with her father kept an old 
book-shop in the Place de 1 'Eglise. It was written 
to her sister, married in Paris, from whom they 
had had no news since the war began, but to 
whom they had managed to get word through— 
I do not know how — once or twice. 

The letter, received only yesterday, was dated 
January 16. It told of a thing that had been 
vaguely rumoured here, that the papers had not 
mentioned, and that had passed for the most part 

22^ 



Journal of Small Things 

unbclieved. The girl supposed her sister would 
have heard, and would be terrified for tliem, and 
was anxious to let her laiow that they were safe. 
I imagine the girl with a smooth blonde head 
and grave blue eyes, and the father, thin and 
stooping, with delicate white features and white 
hair, and a black skull-cap. 

The letter began by saying that they were 
very well, and that the house was but slightly 
damaged. Aunt Emeline was with them, as her 
house was quite in ruins: she had been got out 
from behind the falling of the stair wall. It was 
impossible to go to the house of Cousin Therese, 
but she was safe with the children at the neigh- 
bour Payen's. The whole family had escaped 
miraculously. The girl said that in the midst of 
such terrible suffering they were ashamed to 
have suffered scarcely at all. It seemed as if 
they were not bearing their part of the sacrifice. 

She had thought, that night, it was the house 
falling, and she had leaped out of bed, thinking 
she must go to her father. The shock had lasted 
ten seconds. She had had time to get in the 
dark half-way across the rocking floor, and to 
realize it was not only the house but the whole 
city that was rent and sundered. She had had 
time to think, "It must be an earthquake." 

''That is what tliey tried, at first, to say it 
228 



Wednesday, July 5th 

was," she wrote, "an earthquake. But ive know 
that it was an explosion brought about by one of 
us. It was the Arsenal and the casemates of the 
eighteen bridges full of powder, between the three 
chief gates of the town, that were blown up. It 
was one of their most important depots of muni- 
tions, where they had stored enough powder 
and high explosives to feed their Northern army 
for ten months. No one knows who did it. They 
have posted up offers of high reward for any one 
who finds the author of what they now call 'the 
criminal accident.' 

"In all the towns of the North, where windows 
were broken and doors torn out of their frames, 
and where it was at first thought to be an 
earthquake, they have now put up posters on 
the walls, in their language and ours, demanding 
information about the 'criminal.' 

"But even if there are some who know, not one 
will betray. Moreover, he is surely safe from 
betrayal, dead and buried somewhere under 
the ruins he himself caused for the sake of his 
country. ' ' 

The letter went on to tell of the town so 
sacrificed: streets and quarters destroyed entirely, 
not a house anywhere but was more or less injured, 
the least harmed streets deep in broken glass and 
blocked with fallen tiles and stones. The whole 
229 



Journal of Small Thin^,s 



to*- 



town was become a place of homeless and wounded 
and dead. 

The young girl kept repeating that no one 
complained; it was for the sake of their country. 
The homeless people in the streets said to one 
another, **It is less than our soldiers suffer in the 
trenches. ' ' 

She wrote of things she had seen in that night: 
a father carrying his boy, of perhaps fifteen years, 
in his arms, not believing he was dead; a woman 
they could not get near, under the ruins, alive, 
her child killed beside her; a woman gone mad, 
running in the streets, shrieking a man's name; 
another woman, running also, with her baby in 
her arms, begging every one she met to mend it, 
for its head had been cut off. 

All the less unhappy people had taken in the 
homeless; of the inhabitants of all the ruined 
houses, by the next night less than fifty were left 
to the care of the town. 

The girl wrote: "The people of the town are 
admirable, the homeless' with the rest; we know 
that the sacrifice is for our country, and we make 
it gladly. The terrible suffering of the town is 
offered up for victory and peace." 

She went on to tell of little things : ' ' Your room 
we have given to a mother with three babies; I 
have Aunt Emeline with me, sleeping in father's 
230 



Wednesday, July 5th 

room, for mine is not safe — the roof of the next 
house has fallen against its roof. Father sleeps 
in the room behind the shop, and in the shop we 
have found place to take in ten of the destitute. 
The shock threw most of the books out of their 
cases, and loosened the cases from the walls, so 
that we have had to prop them up. The books are 
heaped out of the way of the mattresses of the 
homeless. I thought father would worry about 
the books; you know, he has always felt them 
to be live things ; but he has no thought for them. 
He is in the Place all day, trying to help clear 
away the glass and stones. The tower of the 
church has fallen all across the Place. All the 
windows in the town are broken, and there is no 
glass to be had for mending them. We live behind 
paper windows, in a gloom that does depress 
one." 

The letter went from one subject to another, 
nervously and rather confusedly. She told of 
immense blocks of stone, hurled from great 
distances into the streets; of the fronts of houses 
ripped out, and the stories dropped or sagging; 
of Aunt Emeline's poor little belongings all 
lost — the portrait of great-grandfather; how 

the enormous factories of and had 

served as a screen to protect the town, or else it 

had been destroyed completely; of one of the 

231 



Journal of Small Things 

little homeless children in the book-shop who 
kept all the time saying her prayers, ' ' Little Jesus, 
stay with us; little Jesus, stay with us," and how 
her name was Cecilette; of the bitter cold that 
made it all more cruel; and, always, how they 
were proud to offer up the sacrifice for their 
country. She sent her love, and her father's, 
always more and more tenderly. It seemed as if 
their love for Mariette, of whom they had no 
word, increased every day. She kept saying 
over and over how proud the town was, to have 
made the sacrifice; and what a brave thing for, 
perhaps, one man alone to have brought about. 



That Naughty Little Boy 

TT was that naughty little boy who was killed, 
■*■ to whose funeral she went this morning in the 
church of St. Augustin. That naughty little boy 
— grown up, wandered far, always a "bad case," 
come home because there was war, and gone out 
with the rest — is dead magnificently. 

He was shot down leading an attack upon the 
works of Thiaumont; they say his men would 
have followed liim anywhere. Think of that 
naughty little boy, grown up to become a leader 
men were proud to follow unto death! 
232 



That Naughty Little Boy 

He used to pull her hair, and pinch her, and 
make faces to frighten her until she cried. His 
Miss never could manage him. His Miss and 
hers were friends, as were his mother and her 
mother, and she was obliged to play with him. 
She was terrified of him, but he had wonderful 
toys that she adored, especially the popgun and 
rocking-horses. Sometimes when he was being 
punished, she was left alone with his toys, and 
was happy. Sometimes he would be nice for a 
minute, and want to kiss and make up, and let 
her ride the big rocking-horse. 

She was remembering it all this morning in the 
church. 

Through all the years between she had never 
seen him, and for her he was still the bad little 
boy. It was the big rocking-horse she was 
particularly remembering in the church. 

There was a crowd in the church. There was 
a whole firmament of candles; the church was 
hung with flags, and full of flowers. The tricolour 
and the palms were laid upon his bier. And 
upon the bier also there was laid his blue cap 
and jacket, stained and faded and torn by shell, 
and his Croix de Guerre and Legion d'Honneur. 

There were all his people in the church, mourn- 
ing for him. For years none of them had seen him 
or spoken of him. But now they were all come 
233 



Journal of Small Things 

to do him honour. The world, that had turned a 
cold shoulder on him, was come to kneel beside 
his blue jacket and his medals. 

She remembered vaguely hearing something 
about some woman he had loved, and who had 
loved him, for whom he had been exiled. She 
wondered if that woman had been in the church, 
that woman who could have no place among his 
people. If she were there, it must have been in 
the dusk of soma aisle chapel, apart and alone. 

Naughty little boy, despair of every governess; 
mauvais sujet, who had erred so far out of the 
paths of his world; soldier of France, who fought 
and led and fell — there he had lain in state, 
honoured of all, under his flag and palms. 

Now it is over, the bad and the good of it, and 
of all is left only the blue cap and jacket, and 
the medals of war. 



Little Mild Gentleman 

** I ^HE little mild gentleman of teacups and 
■*- cakes — so useful when there were people who 
simply had to be asked — always ready to fill a 
place, considerate of old ladies — of course, they 
did not want him at the Front. He had rather 
234 



Gossip 

bad lungs, or something, and was shortsighted at 
that ; it was absurd of him even to try to get out — 
no army doctor would pass him. 

After months and months of effort, he at last 
succeeded in getting himself taken on for ammuni- 
tion work and the making of poison gases. 

Somebody met him the other day, strutting 
along in his blue coat and red trousers. Very 
hurried and important, he had yet to stop and 
tell all about it, his tea-party manner quite 
vanished away, his shortsighted eyes no longer 
mild. 

"It is I who tell you," he said, "I who know 
well, there will not a single one of them be left 
alive within miles and miles of this new stuff 
we are making." 



Gossip 

OINCE his death she has been nursing in a 
^^ typhus hospital, somewhere just behind 
the lines. It is now more than ten months. No 
one has seen her, scarcely any one has heard from 
her. Some people say that she is doing "won- 
derful work" and some people say that it is all 
pose, and some people say that she has an affair 
235 



Journal of Small Things 

with the chief doctor of the hospital, or is it with 
the maire of the town? No one has seen her, but 
every one says she has lost her looks. 

She used to be very pretty, and a great favourite 
in the world. She looked absurdly like her two 
babies. 

The babies are. at the chateau with their 
grandmother, his mot*her, who is an invalid — two 
lovely cherubs at the age of Russian blouses. 

The house off the Avenue du Bois, that used to 
be one of the most charming in Paris, has been 
closed since the war. 

He enlisted when the war broke out, as a com- 
mon soldier of infantry. It certainly was chic of 
him, for he was reforme because of some grave 
enough trouble of the heart, and he might easily 
have kept out of it all, or have got something 
showy but not dangerous. However, he took a 
humble place, and his share of great hardship. 
He had been accustomed all his life to everything 
that belongs to wealth and rank, and his share 
of the burden must have been very heavy for 
him. 

People said: How proud of him she must be. 
He had always been thought a little dull, a dear 
boy, but perhaps a little dull ; one would not have 
dreamed he had it in him. 

People said: They had always been such a 
236 



Gossip 

devoted couple, an ideal young couple. How sad 
it would be if anything happened to him. 

In spite of the difficulties due to his being 
reforme, he got out at last to the Front. He was 
wounded only a short time after, not in any 
attack, or with any glory, but in bringing up the 
comrades' soup to the trenches. It was a shell 
wound in the thigh, not especially dangerous. 
He was invalided straight through to Paris, to 
one of the big city hospitals, and put, of course, 
in the ward with other common soldiers. 

It was a moment of terrible crowding of the 
hospitals: doctors and nurses were overworked; 
there was necessarily much confusion. It was 
no one's fault, perhaps, only the inevitableness of 
things, that for three days the Surgeon Major 
had no time himself to attend to the less badly 
wounded. 

The man with the wound in the thigh asked 
nothing of any one. He did not even ask, they 
say, to have his people sent for. 

They were all down at the chateau ; it was only 
after forty-eight hours that they got word of 
what had happened to him and where he 
was. 

His wife came up to town. His mother, of 
course, was not able to come, and it had not 
seemed worth while to bring the little boys, 
237 



Journal of Small Things 

That was when he had been for two days in the 
hospital. 

Here is a part of the thing that people say they 
do not understand. 

It seems as if his wife might have had him 
moved out of the common ward. It is a little 
dreadful to think of him there, who had always 
been used to so much luxury — among the grey 
blankets, the coarse grey sheets, the beds and 
stretcher-beds crowded together, a bottle of the 
hospital champagne on the night-table, the black 
man in the next bed screaming. She might, it 
would seem, have had in their own doctor, or any 
one of the big doctors. She surely might have 
got permission to stay in the ward and sit by him 
the night he died. 

He died the night after the operation. They 
had amputated too late. It was only the third 
day that the chief saw him. They amputated 
next morning, and he died in the night. 

In that hospital they do not put a screen about 
the bed of one who dies. 

If only some one had done something while 
there was time. It seems such a sad waste of a 
life, and such a dreary end. You see he had 
had no glory. It was for bringing up the com- 
rades' soup that he had died. There were no 
medals to be left after him, with his blue coat and, 
238 



Gossip 

his cap. I suppose there was just one of those 
coarse grey sheets drawn up over him till they 
carried him out of the ward. 

Some people sa}'' he did not want to live. 
But then he was probably too ill to concern 
himself much about anything. Some people say 
his wife did not want him to live. But then she 
may have been too confused and stunned to be 
able to concern herself about anything. Some 
people say she loved another man, and some 
people say he loved another woman. 

Well, from him no one will ever know. It 
appears also as if no one were likely ever to know 
from her. ^ 

And now, no one sees her or hears from her any 
more. 

His mother, who for a time would not 
speak of her, says now only that her devotion in 
the typhus hospital is wonderful, and her self- 
sacrifice; that she renders incalculable service 
there, and is above all praise. 

That much is true. 

And people give all sorts of different, amazing 
reasons for it. 

They all agree, however, upon one point — that 
she has lost her looks completely. 



?39 



Journal of Small Things 



Smoke 

O UDDENLY, as the motor was passing the 
^ Place de la Concorde, Valerie said, "Would 
you mind if we just went home? I should like 
to go home." 

Of course Nanette could only say that she did 
not mind. 

Valerie had invited her to drive in the Bois and 
have tea at the little chalet of gaufres, by the 
gate of the Pre Catalan; she had her mother's 
motor car for the afternoon, and they need not 
take anybody with them. Nanette had thought 
it would be such fun, just the two of them, without 
governesses or maids. She had been looking 
forward to it for days. 

Nanette was still in the schoolroom, whereas 
Valerie, nearly two years older, had escaped from 
all that. The younger girl admired Valerie 
immensely. They had seen a good deal of one 
another three years before in a summer at Dinard. 
Then the difference between their ages had 
mattered less; but now, dividing the school- 
room girl with her hair just tied back from the girl 
who would have been going out if war had not 
ended the world, it invested Valerie with a 
240 



Smoke 

glamour of romance for the little Nanette. The 
romance, moreover, was heightened by the fact 
that people talked rather much of the older girl 
and coupled her name most unhappily with that 
of a man she never could marry, who was proving 
himself to be one of the heroes of the war. 

Nanette would have been very proud to have 
had tea in the Bois with her beautiful friend. 
She said she did not mind turning back, but 
she did mind rather. She thought it odd 
indeed of Valerie to change like that. And 
Valerie 's way of saying it was so odd, as if she had 
been all the time trying to keep it back and could 
not. 

Valerie spoke through the tube to the chauffeur, 
and he turned the car. 

She, Valerie, talked much and fast as they went 
back to the rue de Varennes, but she did not tell 
why she had changed her mind so suddenly. 

The court of the old hotel seemed more than 
usually boring and solemn to Nanette, and also 
the dim grave stairway. She would rather have 
had tea in the salon of the peacock tapestries, 
but Valerie told the old man-servant to bring it 
up to her little sitting-room. 

She went in at her own door ahead of Nanette, 
and looked about her as if for something she 
expected to find in the room. She seemed so 
241 



Journal of Small Things 

odd that Nanette just stood back against the door 
watching her. 

After quite a minute Valerie turned to her and 
said, ''Tell me, does it not seem to you that 
there is smoke in the room?" 

The room was full of the afternoon July sun- 
shine. The window that gave on to the garden 
was open. There were some arum lilies in a vase, 
and their fragrance was heavy in the sunshine. 

"Why, no," said Nanette, "there is no smoke 
here." 

Valerie began moving about the room aim- 
lessly. As she moved here and there she was 
taking off her long suede gloves that Nanette 
admired. 

"It is very queer," she said, never looking 
at Nanette, "but for days, three days, it has 
seemed to me all the time that my room was full 
of smoke. I see it and smell it. At first I thought 
something must be burning somewhere. But 
there was nothing. Besides, it is not that sort 
of smoke. It is the smoke of gunpowder." 

She had thrown her gloves down on a chair, 
and was taking off her hat. She pulled the pins 
out of it, one after the other, and took it off, and 
thrust the pins back into it. "It is quite different 
from other smoke," she said, "there is no doubting 
what it is." 

242 



Smoke 



"Gunpowder smoke! Oh, but Valerie- 



Valerie went on, "Sometimes the smoke is so 
thick in the room that I cannot make my way 
about; it burns my eyes most dreadfully, it gets 
into my throat and chokes me, it makes me cry." 
She tossed her hat into the chair with her gloves, 
and turned to the mirror over the mantelpiece, 
and stood with her hands up, fluffing out her 
lovely gold hair. "It is not only that I cry be- 
cause I am frightened," she said, "it is also that 
the smoke actually hurts my throat and eyes." 

Nanette, standing behind her, could see her 
face in the mirror and thought it was become 
curiously stiff and dull. Valerie's lovely face, 
usually so full of expression, had become quite 
blank. 

It was dreadful. The younger girl was afraid 
of — she did not know what. She could think of 
nothing that would have been of any use to say. 
She knew the older girl was telling her this thing 
only because she had to tell it to some one. 

"You see," Valerie continued, "that is why I 
wanted to come home. I cannot bear to be long 
away from my room, because I am so afraid of 
missing the moment." She had turned back 
from the mirror, and stood looking past Nanette. 

"The moment?" Nanette repeated, as she 
did not go on. 

243 



Journal of Small Things 

"Yes, the moment when the smoke will lift. 
It is every time more dense. There will be a time 
when it quite, quite blinds me, and then I shall 
see." She sat down in the chair that was nearest 
her. She sat limply, leaning back against the 
cushions, her hands lying loosely together in her lap. 

Nanette had been standing all the time just 
inside the door. Now she came nearer, but not 
quite close, and she did not sit down. It was as 
if there were something encircling Valerie 
and keeping every one and everything apart 
from her. Nanette thought of the spells cast 
about fairy-tale princesses, a circle of magic 
drawn around, that no one could step across. 

Valerie sat rigid, her eyes staring. The clock 
on the chimney began to strike five. 

Nanette sprang forward. ** Valerie, Valerie, 
what is the matter?" But Valerie did not hear 
her. 

Nanette caught her hand. It was icy cold. 
"Valerie, Valerie!" She let the cold hand go, 
and touched her cheek. 

But Valerie did not feel the touch. 

Nanette flew to the door and opened it and 
called into the passage, "Jeanne-Marie, Jeanne- 
Marie!" 

The old Bretonne nurse came instantly out from 
her door down the passage. 
244 



Smoke 

"Jeanne-Marie, quick, something has happened 
to mademoiselle." 

The old woman passed her, and was beside 
Valerie. "God and the saints! It has came 
again!" she cried. She put her arms about 
Valerie and the girl fell stiffly against her shoulder. 
"Oh, my lamb, my little lamb!" 

"Is she dead?" implored Nanette. "Jeanne- 
Marie, is she dead?" 

"No, no, it has happened before. Go call 
Francine, quick." 

The maid was already at the door; she must 
have heard the excited voices. 

The old nurse said to the maid, "Help me get 
her to the sofa." To Nanette she said, "Go away, 
mademoiselle; you must go away." 

Nanette besought, "No, oh, no!" 

But the maid said, "Please, mademoiselle, 
Jeanne-Marie knows," and pushed her out of the 
room as if she had been a child. 

Nanette, terribly frightened, waited outside in 
the passage, walking up and down. 

After a long while Francine came and told her 
that mademoiselle was herself again, but very 
tired and must rest. 

From her own home, an hour later, Nanette 
telephoned, and was told that mademoiselle was 
asleep. 

245 



Journal of Small Things 

The next day Valerie sent asking her to come 
about five o'clock. 

Nanette was taken first to Valerie's mother, in 
the drawing-room. 

The marquise was as stately and frigid as 
usual, dressed for the street, rather hurried and 
most difficult to talk to. 

She told Nanette that she was troubled about 
the fright she must have had yesterday, and 
asked her not to speak to any one of what had 
occurred. She looked at Nanette through her 
tortoiseshell lorgnon, and asked if Valerie had 
been talking to her of anything in particular 
before she fainted. "Had she been agitating 
herself with any special confidences?" she asked. 

"No," faltered Nanette, wondering. 

The marquise went on to explain that Valerie 
was very much run down just now and nervous, 
and, in these last days, had had one or two 
fainting spells, such as that of yesterday, but less 
grave. She again asked Nanette not to speak of 
it. She appeared more concerned about people 
knowing of it, and about something she evidently 
feared Nanette might have imagined, than about 
what had happened to Valerie. 

Nanette was anxious only to get to Valerie, 
who wanted her. 

She found a little white Valerie snuggled down 
246 



Smoke 

in the pillows of the big rose-hung bed. She 
seemed very quiet and rested, not strange as 
she had been yesterdaj', only tired. Her brown 
eyes looked bigger than ever, dark-circled, and 
her golden hair was very soft and curly about her 
face, like a child's hair. 

She made Nanette sit close to her, and held 
her hand while she told her stange things, as if 
they were not strange at all. 

When she spoke of yesterday it was as if she 
were speaking of something that happened very 
long ago. "I ought not to have brought you 
home with me," she said, ''but you see I was 
afraid then. I was afraid to be alone. I knew 
the smoke was going to lift, I knew I was going 
to be shown something, and I was afraid to go 
through it alone. Old Jeanne-Marie is a darling, 
but she is different, of course. And mother 
would have been so annoyed if I had spoken of 
him. Mother has Imown all the time how un- 
happy we were, you see, and was always awfully 
annoyed about it." 

Nanette, half understanding, could only say, 
as Valerie paused, "I am so frightened about 
you." 

"Poor Nanette! You must not be frightened, 
for I am not frightened any more. It is all going 
to be well, very soon. Only I have got to tell 
247 



Journal of Small Things 

you about it, because I am so lonely. I must 
tell some one. I am not a bit unhappy any 
more, but just to-day lonely. I have got to tell 
you, though it is selfish of me. ' ' 

''I love you to tell me, please, Valerie." 

"I was terribly unhappy," Valerie went on, 
"when I thought it was only he who would die. 
I knew, the moment I realized it was gunpowder 
smoke, that he was going to be killed. I knew 
that the smoke would lift for me when the moment 
came, and that then I should see him die." 

''Valerie, oh, Valerie!" 

"But you need not be sad for me, Nanette, 
because there is a thing I know that makes 
it all quite beautiful and right." She lifted 
herself up from the pillows, still holding Nanette's 
hand; the two heavy gold braids of her 
hair fell over her shoulders. "You see, we 
never could have been happy together, he and 
I," she said, "there would have been nothing but 
unhappiness for us both, always. I must tell 
you what I saw. I must have some one know, 
and you seem to understand things. You will not 
speak of it, till afterwards. And now, as I am 
telling you, you will not interrupt me, will you? 
You will not say any of the things most people 
would say, to break into my peace?" She 
stopped and waited, looking at Nanette intensely. 
248 



Smoke 

Nanette could not speak at all. 

But Valerie must have understood, for she told 
it. She told it always quietly, as if she had 
passed beyond any shock or grief or sense of its 
strangeness: ''The smoke was all about him, and 
about them; he and they had to fight blindly. 
They fought with bayonets* It was in the street of 
a village; I saw the cobbles under his feet, and 
a broken doorstep. He fought and fought. It 
seemed very long; he was quite alone to fight 
against so many of them. There were blue heaps 
behind him on the cobbles; I could make out just 
vaguely through the smoke. I think they were 
his comrades, wounded and dead. The others, 
the grey ones, were too many. I saw their grey 
shapes and their bayonets, and his wounds, I 
saw his face, just as he went down. His face was 
all alight, as it was the last time I saw him, ' ' Her 
own eyes were shining when she stopped, and her 
voice was like a singing. 

In the quiet of the room Nanette waited, as 
if there were some spell she was afraid to 
break. 

Valerie told her: "The last time I saw him 
was when he went out, nearly two years ago. I 
knew the station he would be passing through, 
with just some minutes there; and I went, and 
\yaited for him. I did not care if people knew. I 
249 



Journal of Small Things 

ran to him in the crowd, and he saw me, and he 
said, 'Why, my Valerie, it is you!' as if there 
were a miracle. In my vision, his face was just 
as it had been then. There was no sound at all 
in my vision, but from his face, as he died, I knew 
he was saying, 'Why, my Valerie, it is you!' " 
Her warm, live hand held Nanette's hand steadily. 
"I know that I shall go to meet him, that I shall 
be waiting for him when he dies ; I know, Nanette. 
I know because of the look there was in his face. I 
shall be waiting there, and he shall see me. And so 
I have no grief or fear. ' ' She was patting Nanette 's 
hand to comfort her. "Is not it strange, 
Nanette; to-day I have a letter from him, a sad 
letter. And I have written him a happy one, 
and he will not understand why at all. He does 
not know how soon we will be together. I 
cannot tell him. And I am lonely waiting, now 
I know. Nanette, I am so glad that it is I who 
will go first." 

Perhaps, when she is older, Nanette will have 
to wonder if there was something she might have 
done. 

But nothing would have made any difference. 

In the next days they had many doctors. But 
none of the doctors knew what it was, or could do 
anything. 

A week from the day when the smoke had 
250 



Hospital, Saturday, July 8th 

lifted, Nanette sent arum lilies for old Jeanne- 
Marie to put into Valerie's hands. 

And three days after that, the man Valerie 
never could have married was killed. 

He had gone down, it was known afterwards, 
in house-to-house fighting, in a street of the 
village of X . 



Hospital, Saturday, July 8th 

QOME new ones are arrived from the Somme, 
^ only ten for my ward, the orderly told me at 
the gate. They were brought in at four o'clock 
this morning. The orderly, Hamond, said, 
"They are nothing so bad as the Verduns." 

When I came to the top of the stairs, Madame 
Marthe was in the corridor, waiting for Madame 
Bajde to come and unlock the linen-press. She 
looked very tired already, at the beginning of 
the day, and she was walking up and down 
between the stairs and the door of our ward, not 
able to keep still for a minute. 

She told them off on her small fine fingers, 
stained with iodine: "Two heads, one of them 
has a bad leg- wound also; one ampute of the 
arm, infected; two of the leg, infected both of 
them; two faces; a bad chest- wound, bullet; 

251 



Journal of Small Things 

other two slight. Zut! that Madame Bayle, will 
she never come! Run over to the storehouse 
and tell them I have got to have tubes and funnels 
to feed the 9 and 14. See that they give them 
to you, whatever fuss they make, tell them it is 
for very bad faces. Quick now, the chief has 
been around, and they are going to trepan the 
worst head this morning." 



Hospital, Sunday, July 9th 

'*" I ^HE man they trepanned yesterday will not 
"■- keep still; he worries about everything. 
They say he is doing well, but he talks all the 
time. They told me to sit by him and try to 
make him stay quiet. At first he held my hand 
and seemed to rest, but he would not shut his 
eyes, and after a little he began to talk again. 

He was worried because he thought I had not 
enough to eat; he thought, because I was so thin, 
that I must be very poor. He said he had some 
biscuits and some rillettes de Tours done up 
together in a piece of newspaper. The package 
had been in his musette when he went into the 
charge. Where was his musette? He would 
have me go and find it, and eat the biscuits, and 
252 



Monday, July 10th 

the rillettes de Tours. He worried because he 
had fallen back into a trench deep with water, 
and the newspaper package might have got wet. 
But I must not mind that, he said, it was better 
than starving. What had they done with his 
musette? I must go and get it. And I must 
not mind taking his biscuits and rillettes de 
Tours, for he was not hungry at all. 



Monday, July loth 

A LL day long there has been sunshine, and the 
•^ ^ sky has been blue. There were great white 
clouds that mounted up over the city, and that 
one kept imagining was the smoke of battle. 
The blue of the sky was wonderful, infinite and 
near, like something of music or of religion, and 
the sunshine was like golden wine. But those 
soft white pufcs of cloud were terrible. 

At the top of the Champs Elysees, behind the 
Arch, the clouds were driven up as if it were 
from the mouths of cannon. 

It must be just like that the smoke is rising 
in the sunshine over the high edge of a field 
I used to know. They say that field is laid 
across everywhere with railroad tracks, along 
which monster grey cannon crawl up to their 

253 



Journal of Small Things 

positions, and crawl back across again when 
their work is done. Hundreds of horses are 
corralled in the field, and everywhere there are 
dotted little white tents. Sometimes black faces 
come to the openings of the tents, and one would 
think of the Village Negre people went to see in 
Magic City, ages and ages ago. 

It seems strange that when the great white 
clouds mounted up from behind the Arch of 
Triumph, the city did not rock beneath them. 
It seems strange that the great white clouds rose 
silently and really were only clouds. 



Thursday, July 13th 

"PEOPLE in the streets go slowly, looking up at 
■*■ the flags, and stopping to stand. They 
speak to one another wherever they happen to be 
standing together, and say that they hope 
to-morrow will be a fine day. 

The streets are getting ready for to-moriow, 
hanging out flags and streamers and garlands to 
the breeze that is strong to-day, and to the 
comings and goings of sunshine. Grey minutes 
and gold minutes follow one another across the 
city, where the flags of the different nations are 
blending their colours and waving all together. 

254 



Thursday, July 13th 

Many different uniforms, on their way up and 
down the streets, salute one another, and stop 
and linger about together, looking at their flags. 

The streets are full of bandages and crutches, 
pinned-up trouser-legs and pinned-up coat-sleeves, 
steps that halt along with tap of canes, and 
shuffling, uncertain steps that must be led. 

One is always coming in the streets upon an 
especial type of little group of people, one might 
indeed think each time that it was the same little 
group over again, so much each different one of 
them resembles all the others — four or five 
women, an old man, a young sick-looking man, 
and quite a tagging on of children. One knows 
that they are refugees. They have the unmis- 
takable look of refugees. It gives them all that 
likeness, every little dragging tribe of them to 
every other. It is the look of people who are 
waiting for something, and to whom nothing in 
the meanwhile matters. They are indifferent and 
dull because nothing else matters. They make 
no effort and take no trouble — of what use? 
It is not worth their while to better things that 
will not last. There is always a woman in poor 
rusty deep mourning who has tied her little 
girl's hair with a Belgian ribbon. 

Music comes and goes at odd times through 
tlie streets, as pipe and drum and trumpet of 



Journal of Small Things 

to-morrow's procession are moved this way and 
that to their various places. 

You get fragments of strange music, sometimes 
come from very far-away strange countries, to 
these streets. 

Friday, July 14th: Pink Shoes 

TT would be too unkind of it to rain, as if the 
"■■ fete were not already shadowed enough. 

One was angry waking in the rain. 

It rained when they took their wreaths and 
flowers to the statues of Strasburg and Lille, and 
it rained when the troops were massed before the 
Invalides for the prise d'armes. 

But afterwards the rain did stop. 

A girl and a limping soldier, ahead of us as we 
went to the Nord-Sud, were sopping wet. I 
suppose they had been standing for hours on 
the Esplanade. Her knitted cape and cotton 
blouse were quite soaked through. She had no 
hat, and she was laughing because her brown 
curls dripped into her eyes. 

In the Place de la Concorde people had put 
down their umbrellas, and were telling one 
another that it was really better not to have the 
heat of sunshine. 

"We waited a little with the crowd in the Place, 
256 



Friday, July 14th 

the friendly, orderly Paris crowd that used to 
come to fetes so gaily, grave now, almost 
solemn. The crowd was full of wounded. The 
men flung back out of the war, broken, were 
come to watch their comrades pass between two 
battles. The crowd gave place to them, and 
they were proud in it. 

Then Diane came, with Miss and the babies, 
both of them tremendously excited in their 
little mackintosh coats. 

One of the club servants showed us to the small 
writing-room, where a window had been reserved 
for us. From the window we looked down on the 
wide grey stream of the street between banks of 
people. One way we could see the great Place 
kept clear also, in grey reaches, past islands of 
crowd, and the other way we could see a heap of 
people on the steps of the Madeleine. 

The babies sat on the window-ledge and forgot 
everything at once because of another baby, 
down in the crowd on the opposite kerb, who 
wore a pink bonnet and pink shoes, and had a 
little flag in either hand. 

**0h, mummy, her mummy has put down a 
newspaper for her to stand on, so the wet won't 
hurt her shoes." 

"Yes, Cricri darling. Don't wriggle so, child; 
Miss, do watch out for her." 
257 



Journal of Small Things 

''I've got pink shoes, too, haven't I, Fafa?" 

Diane, holding Fafa very tight on the window- 
ledge — not because he wriggled, he was too big, 
but because he might have been grown up, like 
the little boys of other mothers, and gone away to 
war — was telling him what a wonderful thing it 
was he had come to see, and how, when he was a 
big man, he would always remember it, and could 
say to people, "On the 14th of July, 1916, I 
saw '* 

"Yes, mummy! Oh, mummy, do you suppose 
that little girl's shoes are quite new for to-day?" 

"Babies, you are going to see Belgian soldiers; 
you will always and always remember what they 
did for us. And there will be British soldiers; 
you know how they are fighting for us, just the 
same as papa and Uncle Raoul. And you will 
see the Russians, who have come from so far away 
to help us ; and beautiful Hindus, and big Africans, 
and the little Anamites, and our own men. ' ' 

Her voice thrilled when she said ' ' our own men. ' ' 

Her voice has that curious quality of drawing 
darkness: it made me feel the shadows when she 
said like that, "our own men." 

She said, "There will be the fusilliers marins, 

and the cuirassiers, and the artilleurs. You may 

see the 75 ', Fafa. And there will be the chasseurs 

a pied, from Verdun, with their fourragere." 

258 



Friday, July 14th 

"Mummy, was it her mummy who gave her 
the little flags?" 

"I think so, Fafa darling." 

"Is it her mummy there with her?" 

"I think so." 

"Is her papa gone to the war, like my papa?" 

Diane put her cheek down against the top of 
his little fuzzy head as she stood with her arms 
around him. 

"Is her papa gone to the war too, mummy?" 

"I think so." 

"She has to stand up all the time, mummy, will 
she not be tired? I am afraid she will be tired 
before the procession comes. When will the 
procession come, mummy?" 

Diane said to me, "To think it is the first day 
of flags and music we have had since the war 
began " 

I was thinking all the time of the day when the 
troops will come home. I was thinking that this 
day was a promise of that day. I knew that Diane 
was thinking of that also. Her eyes filled with 
tears; I saw them through the tears that were in 
my own eyes. "We both knew so well. The men 
look forward fearlessly to that day, but the women 
know fear. Every woman in the crowd was think- 
ing how this day promised that day, gloriously; 
and every one was thinking — but if Jie does not 
come home. 259 



Journal of Small Things 

The people were come to their day of flags and 
music almost as if it were to some religious 
ceremony. They waited in the grey morning to 
see their troops go by ; coming from battles, going 
back again to battles, and always with the war 
so close that, if it were not for the sounds of the 
city, we could have heard its thundering. 

Diane said, because she did not want the 
children to think she was sad, **The little pink 
girl must have come very early to have got so 
good a place." 

''Mummy, did she have a nice breakfast before 
she came?" 

**0h, yes, a lovely breakfast." 

''Will the procession never come, mummy dear? 
That little girl must be so tired. Why doesn't 
the procession come, mummy?" 

"Oh, there's the sun," Cricri sang out, wriggling 
in Miss's arms, and clapping her hands. ** There's 
the sun come out!" 

The sun shone straight into our eyes for a few 
minutes, and then the soft grey settled down 
again. 

We heard the sound of music and of marching, 
from a long way off. 

The crowd stirred and thrilled. 

"They are coming," cried the babies, "they're 
coming!" 

^60 



Friday, July 14th 

"Yes, yes, they're coming. What is that the 
band plays? There's the Garde Republicaine, 
and the music — listen, babies! And now it is 
Belgian music. There are the Belgians— see the 
people run out to give them flowers! There are 
the mitrailleuses and the Lanciers and the 
Cyclistes!" 

''Mummy, IVe got a bicycle too haven't I; 
and I can ride it well, can't I?" 

''Now the English, with their music! Cricri, 
do keep still and let Miss see. How beautifully 
they march! Aren't you proud. Miss? There 
are the Ansacs, Fafa; and look at the Indians! 
The street is carpeted with flowers: they cannot 
pick them up, they walk over them. There are 
the Russians. Look, babies, the little boys and 
girls from the crowd run out and pick up the 
flowers to give them! Listen, the Russian 
music sounds like great seas and winds in 
forests. It will be our own men coming now, 
Fafa." 

"Mummy, oh, mummy! I can't see the little 
girl any more!" 

"Now it will be our own men coming! Look, 
look, babies, to see the very first of them! 
There 's our own music — listen. ' ' 

Holding Fafa close against her shoulder, she 
leaned out past him over the window-ledge, her 
261 



Journal of Small Things 

eyes lighted with that flame one knows in 
soldiers' eyes. 

"They will be our own men, w^ho have fought 
for us, who wall go back to fight for us. Fafa, 
think of it! Here they are, their music — oh, 
oh, it is the Chant du Depart!" 

"Mummy, do you think we'll never any more see 
the little girl with the pink shoes?" 



Monday, July 17th 

^WENTY-EIGHT beds and ten stretcher-beds, 
-■- the ward is full again. They are all from 
the Somme. They are not nearly so bad as those 
from Verdun and the Champagne. There has 
been only one of them, so far, who died. 

He was brought in on Wednesday, they oper- 
ated next morning, and he died in the night. 
The wound had become gangrenous. 

He was twenty-five years old. He was from 
the invaded countries, and had no one, no one at 
all, who could come. He had had no news of his 
people since the beginning of the war, nor had 
he been able to send his ncAvs to them. He had 
never been out of his little commune, except to 
go to the trenches. He had no name to give of 
any friend. 

262 



Monday, July 17th 

The patronne told me to go to the funeral, for 
there was no one else to go. None of the real 
nurses could be spared, and very few of the men 
from downstairs would be able to walk so far. 
It was to be at Pantin. We would go first to 
the church. "We would leave the hospital at 
half-past thjee. 

I tell of so many funerals. But there are so 
many, and they impress me so. Those men die 
for us, and we, who may not die — how could it 
be but that their dying means more to us than 
other things? There is nothing we can do for 
those who fall and lie on the battlefield. But 
with these, here, we go a little way. 

And what else is there? 

I have got some decent clothes, and I go some- 
times to see some one, and we pretend we are 
amused by bits of gossip. We say, "Oh, that's 
a hat from Rose-Marie!" and, "Where did you 
get your tricot?" But it is as if we went on a 
journey, and we come home tired from it, to the 
dark shelter of our thoughts. 

One rests better following through endless poor 
streets after a pine-box with the flag upon it and 
the palms. 

The people stand back, the men salute, the 
women make the sign of the Cross, and we keep 
our own small perfect silence with us as we pass. 
263 



Journal of Small Things 

The piquet d'honneur walked with, arms reversed, 
four on either side of him. 

There was no one hut me to bring him flowers, 
but he had a big fine tin wreath from his comrades 
of our service, and his palms from the Ville de 
Paris, and the spray of zinc flowers with the 
ribbon marked ' ' Souvenir Frangais ' ' that, Madame 
Bayle said, is always sent from the Ministere de 
la Guerre. 

Madame Bayle came with us. She is fat and 
always ill, but she could be spared from the 
linen-room. I never had seen her before "en 
civil." She had a large black hat from which, 
she told me, she had, for the occasion, taken off 
fourteen red roses. I thought, as we walked to- 
gether, "Why, she and I are bitter enemies! For 
nine months we have quarrelled every day!" 

"We walked together, close behind the boy, who 
had no one but we two and five of his comrades 
to follow him. 

It was hot, there was no air at all. There was 
a terrible odour of disinfectant. 

Madame Bayle said, "It is because of the 
gangrene, ' ' and quite worried for fear I could not 
stand it. 

And I worried about her bad knee. Was it 
bad to-day? I was afraid she would be very 
tired. 

264 



Monday, July 17th 

We felt most sympathetically about each other. 

She kept saying, **It is all the same sad, it is 
all the same sad." 

One of the wounded said, "Not so sad as to lie 
out for the crows in no-man's-land." 

The Garde Republicaine, standing at attention, 
formed an aisle for him and for us to pass through 
into the church. Of course, they never come 
into the church. 

Madame Bayle, kneeling stiffly beside him, 
went on whispering, "C'est tout de meme triste," 
as if it were a sort of prayer. ' ' C 'est tout de meme 
triste d'etre seul comme ca." 

An old woman appeared from somewhere and 
put a little bunch of marguerites on his flag, and 
went away again. The stems of the marguerites 
were done up in white paper. Some women came 
and stayed; and some little girls, and a troop of 
small boys, in black blouses, just let out from the 
school opposite. 

When it was over, they all filed out, past Madame 
Bayle and me, as we stood in the place where 
would have been his people. 

On and on we went, through streets always 
sadder and more sad as they frayed out at the 
edge of the city. 

Madame Bayle always shuffled and panted, 
and the wounded followed more and more slowly. 
265 



Journal of Small Things 

The city gate, and the ramparts, and longer, 
wider, even sadder streets to pass along, over the 
cobbles; then an avenue of limes in fragrant 
blossom, and the entrance of the great cemetery. 

The piquet d'honneur left us at the gate, 
and we were just ourselves to go on with him 
to the place where the soldiers who are lonely 
like him lie, so many of them together. 

It is a beautiful place. When his people can 
come to him I think they will be proud to find 
him in so beautiful a place. 

"We put our flowers with him, and went away 
Madame Bayle always saying, ''C'est triste tout 
de meme, d'etre comme qa, tout seul." 

The wounded went so fast ahead of us out of 
the cemetery that Madame Bayle could not keep 
up at all. 

She panted, "They are so glad to get out of it, 
poor boys, poor boys. They will wait for us at 
the entrance; We will go all of us together to 
the cafe on the right of the entrance for our 
'little glass.' '' 

Thursday, July 20th: Little Florist 

T ^EEY early this morning, on my way to the 

" hospital, I stopped at the little florist's 

shop round the corner, near the church, to get 

266 



Thursday, July 20th 

some blue and purple larkspur and crimson 
ramble-roses. 

It was so early, I was afraid Jeannette would 
not yet be back with the day's liowers from the 
great central markets. 

It is Jeannette, the younger, pretty sister, who 
goes every morning to choose the fresh flowers, 
and Caroline, who in the meanwhile puts the 
little shop in order to receive them, washing 
their window and filling their bowls and vases 
with water, and scrubbing out the floor. 

Caroline is not yet twenty-five years old, and 
Jeannette is eighteen. They are quite alone 
now to keep the little shop. 

Their father is paralyzed, helpless, and they 
must take care of him. 

The brother, who used to take care of them all, 
is at the war. 

Just two years ago, in the early summer, 
before the war, I remember that Caroline, who 
is not really pretty at all, suddenly came to be 
quite beautiful. Her small dark thin face was 
aglow, as if her heart were full of sunlight, 
and she moved about the shop in a way so glad 
that it seemed as if every little humble thing 
she had to do were become for her part of a 
dance. She gave away to one then more than 
one bought of larkspur and ramble-roses, and 
267 



Journal of Small Things 

Jeannette and the big brother looked on leni- 
ently. 

All that seems now very long ago. 

So few people can bear happy colours in these 
days, that Jeannette brings back from the market 
little else but white and purple flowers, and green 
leaves for wreaths and crosses. 

I was very early this morning, and Jeannette 
was not yet come back from the Halles. 

Caroline was down on her knees, scrubbing the 
floor. She was crying as she scrubbed the floor. 

She had not expected any one to come so early, 
and she was crying just as hard as she could cry, 
while she was alone and had the time. 

She got up from her knees and rubbed her bare 
arm across her eyes. 

I thought of her brother at the war, and of the 
some one because of whom, perhaps, she had been 
happy, two years ago. I scarcely dared to ask, 
"Is it bad news, Caroline?" 

"No, Madame," she said, still rubbing her 
eyes, "No, Madame, it is nothing special. It is 
only as if there were nothing but tears in the 
world.'* 



:?68 



Trains 



Trains 

TWO trains are side-tracked in the fields, 
beyond the little country station, where the 
wheat is already bronzed and heavy-headed, and 
the poppies flame through it, and where there is 
all the music of grass-hoppers and crickets and 
birds. 

One is a train of men coming back from the 
Front on leave, and very gay. They are all 
laughing and singing in the carriages. They are 
all getting themselves tidied up, for shortly they 
will be in Paris. The officers in several of the 
carriages have managed to get some water, and 
are scrubbing luxuriously, with tin-cups and 
soup-plates for basins. Soapy faces appear at 
the windows. The men have opened the carriage 
doors all along the train and got out to tumble 
about in the grass at the edge of the train. They 
pick buttercups that grow close to the rails, and 
some of them have wandered off into the tall 
wheat to gather poppies. 

The second train on the siding is full of wounded, 
who must wait, like the permissionnaires, to let 
pass the munition and troop trains going out. 
The wounded are quite comfortably arranged on 
their tiers of stretchers ; the doctors and orderlies 
^69 



Journal of Small Things 

have all the needed things, and move about 
competently, up and down the train. It is 
strange how quiet the train of wounded is. It 
is only here and there along it that one hears 
moaning or a cry. 

A munition train crawls by, all grey. It is 
nothing that the permissionnaires or wounded 
need notice. 

Then, after a time, that seems very long, comes 
a troop-train going out. The men in the troop 
train hang out of the windows and look silently 
upon all the things they are passing in the fields, 
that seem so full of peace and so kind. 

They wave to the permissionnaires, who are 
silent for a moment, watching them as they go. 
And then they pass the train of wounded, some 
of whom look up at them. 

Monday, July 24th — 5.30 of the 
morning 

pEROT has just gone. 

•'■ He was noiselessly creeping down the 
outside stairs from his attic room. But I was 
waiting at the door on the landing, and made 
him come in for a minute to the apartment. 
He sat, loaded down with all his campaign 
270 



Monday, July 24th 

things, in the little yellow chair, and I sat in the 
big yellow chair, and we looked at one another. 

It is odd how one never can say any of the 
things to them J and how, always, they under- 
stand perfectly all the things one would say if 
one could. 

He looked very ill, poor boy. Ten days' leave 
of convalescence after five months in the hospital 
has really not given him enough time to pick up. 
And he worries so. He can try to eat, but he 
cannot sleep at all. All night he thinks and 
thinks. 

I know so very well just what he thinks. 

He has never had many words with which to 
tell me, for he has had all his short life to work 
so hard that he could get little time for learning 
to express himself. But sometimes he says, 
"If I knew they were dead " 

They are his two little sisters. The mother 
died five years ago, the father several years 
before that. He helped his mother when he was 
still a schoolboy to take care of the little sisters, 
Celestine and Marie; and when the mother was 
dead he took care of them alone. Now he is 
twenty-four years old, and Celestine is seven- 
teen and Marie sixteen. 

Since the day he left, two years less just eleven 
days ago, he has had no word of them at all, 
271 



Journal of Small Things 

Others from those invaded countries have had 
perhaps messages, a postal card, some sort of a 
letter ; but he had had no word. 

An application we got through for him to the 
maire of the nearest large town has had only the 
answer that the farm exists no more and that 
nothing has been known of the two young girls. 

It was the **le mauvais sang qu'il faisait," as 
Madame Marthe said, that kept him so long 
from getting well. His wound in the shoulder 
was pretty bad, but what was worse was his 
unceasing grief and dread. He would have died, 
of the wound and that, if he had not been so young 
and northern and strong. 

His wound got itself well. The new ones 
needed his place in the hospital. He was given 
ten days' sick leave, and came to spend it in 
the room upstairs, because he had nowhere else 
to go. 

Now his leave has come to an end, and he is 
going back to his depot, and then to the Front. 
I may never see him again, my poor boy, whose 
face goes white and red, and white and red, and 
whose blue northern eyes fill with tears if one 
speaks kindly to him. 

He sat in the little yellow chair and I sat in the 
big yellow chair, and we looked at each other in 
the wet grey early morning. 

yj2 



Monday, July 24th 

I said, "They gave you a good breakfast?" 

'*0h, yes, madame." 

"And your little package, for lunch in the 
train?" 

"Oh, yes, madame, and the cigarettes." 

"Some letter-paper to write to me on?" 

"Yes, madame." 

"You have all the money you need, you are 
sure, my child?" 

"Oh, yes, madame, much more than I need. I 
still have that twenty francs. ' ' 

"You promise to let me know if I can do any- 
thing for you?" 

* ' Yes, madame. ' ' 

"And you will take care of yourself, please, 
Perot." 

"Yes, madame." 

The clock struck once, the first quarter hour 
past five. 

"You must go, my child." 

He stood up. 

I went to the door with him. 

"You would not have liked me to come to the 
train, Perot?" 

"No, madame, because I should have cried; I 
am so stupid, madame." 

"I would have cried too. And so, my child — 
until a less sad day. ' ' 

2/3 



Journal of Small Things 

*' Madame — thank you." 

**No, I thank you, little soldier." 



Wednesday, July 26th 

'T^ HIS morning, at the hospital, one of the Ver- 
■*- dun men came up from the convalescent 
ward downstairs, where he was sent when they 
evacuated for the Somme, to say good-bye to us. 
He is well enough, and he is going back. He is one 
of the older men, one of those who have the look 
of worrying about wives and babies. He has 
been twice wounded. The first was a bad 
wound; he had taken long to get over it in some 
hospital of the provinces, and to be able to go 
back and be wounded again. Now he is going 
back for the third time. 

I remember his having told me, at first, when 
he was quite ill and talked with fever, that he 
was terribly afraid of Verdun. He said he did 
not mind what they did with him if only they 
did not send him back to Verdun. He said he 
was afraid of the bayonet. He could kill with 
the gun, he said, but not with the bayonet. He 
said he stood paralyzed when it was the moment 
to strike with the bayonet, and could not strike. 
274 



Wednesday, July 26th 

It was after he left my ward that his wife had 
come up from the Limousin, and brought the 
two little girls to visit him, I never saw her, but 
I remember how happy he was. He told me his 
wife could, not stay long because she had to go 
back and take care of the cows. They had two 
cows, he said. 

Now he bade good-bye to Madame Marthe, 
who was washing her hands with sublime after 
a dressing, and who gave him a sharp red elbow 
to shake. 

He said good-bye to the men in the ward, each 
one in turn, and stood a minute looking at his 
old place and said, ' ' One was well off there. ' ' 

I went to the door with him. 

It was very hot in the ward, and there were flies 
buzzing. 

I thought: To be going back to that, when 
one knows it already; to be going back to that, 
when one has no longer youth's elan and careless- 
ness; when one has to worry over labour and 
poverty left behind. 

I suppose he saw something in my face of what 
I felt, for he said, in a kind, pitying way, as if to 
help me, "Do not be sad, madame. " And he 
said the thing they all say, all of them, "I' faut 
b'en, tous les copains sont la.'* 

"All the others are there." 
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Journal of Small Things 

And then, this afternoon, I heard another 
soldier say that. 

It was in the rue de la Paix. He was giving an 
order to the chauffeur. His little boy, in a 
white pique dress with a big lace collar, was 
standing beside him, dancing up and down and 
hanging on his hand. 

His wife leaned out of the window of the 
motor and called to me as I passed, and he 
turned. I stopped, and we talked for a minute. 

He has been home on a six days' leave and is 
going back to-night. 

He is a captain in the chasseurs a pied. Before 
the war he was an officer in a smart cavalry 
regiment, but he had himself transferred into 
the infantry when the war began, I have heard 
the men in the hospital talk of him. They say, 
"C'est un type epatant, celui-la." They say he 
never sends his men to reconnoitre, but goes 
himself, always. 

He looked very young and splendid in his 
smart uniform, standing at the door of the 
motor. 

The little boy, always dancing up and down 
beside him, said, ** We've got his picture taken! 
We 've got his picture taken ! ' ' 

His wife tried to laugh but I saw her eyes in 
the shadow of her white lace hat. "It's true," 
276 



Wednesday, July 26th 

she said, "we dragged him to it, poor boy. We 
had nothing decent of him at all, you know." 

She was very lovely in her lovely things, with 
a heap of red roses beside her on the seat of the 
motor. 

Somehow, that it was all so pretty made it 
sadder. In the bright street I thought: To go 
back to that, when one has so much, when one 
has everything in the world, and is young and 
full of radiant life. 

His wife and I looked at each other. 

He smiled down at her, as if it were only for 
her one need be sorry. "We have had six 
perfect days," he said, "and you know it 
must be — the others are there." 

I have written those words many times over. 
But they are the words one hears every day. 
As the men go back, each one of them from the 
however different circumstances of his life, that 
is all they seem to find to say about it. It does 
not make a fine phrase, but it has come to mean 
for me a beautiful thing. Behind the great 
sweep of battles it is one of the things I shall 
always be glad to have known. 

I find myself wanting to put each saying of it 
away mth other memories in this book that for 
two years has kept me company. 

Two years ago — so long ago that I find myself 
277 



Journal of Small Things 

saying, once upon a time — there was a small 
square tower room that had three windows, 
narrow and deep-set, the loopholes of ancient 
defences. Once upon a time the three windows 
stood open to the night and the garden, and to 
a sense, somehow, of the friendly crowding up of 
the little town about the rampart walls, and to 
the country lying away beyond, sweet in the 
dark with forest and field. 

I know that where war has passed strangers 
can look into broken houses and see all that was 
intimate and small and dear betrayed with ruin 
of stones and lives, and that, like that, people 
who do not care may glance in passing into the 
wreck of the north tower room. 

The tower had stood for so long, keeping watch 
over that road to Paris — how strange to think 
it will keep watch no more! It had looked down, 
in its long time, on much of war, and held its 
own through three besiegings — and now it is 
fallen. 

Now it is fallen, the strong tower, in a land 
that is laid waste, from which peace has been 
taken away, and joy, out of the plentiful fields. 

Already that night was passed beyond the end 
of the world. 

In the morning of that day, the morning of 
that last Sunday of peace, I had stood in my 
278 



Wednesday, July 26th 

window over the garden and seen the sunshine, 
thick and golden after rain, on wet sweet things, 
lawns and little formal stately paths and box 
edges and clipped yews, roses and heliotrope 
and petunias. And I had not known. I had 
seen the close, soft dream-sky of France full of 
white clouds above the tops of trees that were 
green and golden, or sometimes as dark as purple 
and black. And I had not known. 

The white peacocks were spreading their 
dreams of tails below the terrace, between the 
crouching sphynxes that years and years of moss 
and ivy and rose- vines had grown over. 

There had been church bells ringing to the 
voices of the garden, its birds and bees and 
grasshoppers. And I had not known. 

Against the rampart walls I could see, between 
the trees, the town roofs gathered close, rust-red 
ancient tiles and thatch that time and weathers 
had made beautiful, and crooked chimney-pots 
and blue smoke rising straight and high in the 
still, blue air. 

I could hear the little sounds of the village, 
together with the garden sounds and the bells. 

I could smell hearth fires and fresh-baked 
bread, together with the new-cut grass and 
heliotrope and roses. 

Every sound had been part of the stillness; 
279 



Journal of Small Things 

all the lines and colours of things belonged 
together in that soft harmony which is so especially 
of France. I had thought, how it was France! 
And I had not known. 

I had gone to Mass in the little ancient, dusky 
church of the village. I had gone down across 
the parterres, and along the avenue of limes, 
through the summer woods that were so happy 
and alive, out at the little green gate in the 
rampart walls, and down the street of big square 
old cobbles, between the nestling houses. 

And in the church there had been incense and 
candles, and the white caps of old women, and 
the wriggling of the children in their Sunday 
clothes. 

When I came back, there were the papers 
arrived from Paris. And nothing again was 
ever, ever, to be the same. 

That night, not knowing why, I wanted to 
write down for my own memory notes of just 
those little things that seem so small, and that 
went all together to the making of a mood we 
can no more find to turn to. 

I wanted to v/rite of the fragrance of delicate 
years that abode in my tower room; of the dim, 
cloudy mirror over the mantel that had reflected 
so many stories; of how the writing-table stood 
in the north window, and had nothing but a bov.i 
280 



Wednesday, July 26th 

of sweet-peas and my travelling-desk things on 
it; and that the window was open, and how 
all the wet, sweet, quite cold night came in; 
and that, over the tops of the dark trees, and 
between the dark cloud masses, I could see all 
the stars of the Lyre, Vega, blue-white, very 
big and near, all more brilliant, I thought, 
than ever I had known them before. I wanted 
to explain how, somehow, one felt the village, 
down under the rampart walls, though it slept 
and made no sound, and how friendly its presence 
was as it lay so close, protecting and protected, 
about its ancient burg. 

Now the houses are roofless, and the rampart 
walls are broken. The tower is fallen. Nothing 
is left unchanged there, to-night, but the shining 
down of the August stars. 

I had dreamed of the hoofbeats of galloping 
horses and crash of great wheels and of thunder. 
And all that came, and does not cease. I had 
dreamed of blood on the castle stairs, dripping 
and dripping. And they say that there was one 
night especially, when the castle was so full of 
wounded men, that there was nowhere left to 
lay them in any of the rooms, or in the lower halls. 
They carried them as they were brought in up 
the stairs to lie on the floor of the Long Gallery. 
And the blood ran down the stairs, 
281 



Journal of Small Things 

There was fighting, over and over, up and 
down, those big square cobbles of the streets and 
of the market place, and from the doors and 
windows and roofs of those little houses. 

The people of the streets and houses are gone, 
who knows where, with their poor small bundles, 
fled long ago, before the hoofbeats and wheels 
and thunder. 

Across these things, how absurd to remember 
the sweet-peas there were, tliat Sunday night, 
in a bowl on a writing-table ! 

It was very hot in the ward to-day; the flies 
buzzed horridly up and down the window- 
panes. 

It was a very bad day in the ward. Thirty-four 
was very low. He had a hsemorrhage yesterday, 
and all day he seemed to be sinking. It was to-day 
he received his Croix de Guerre. The captain 
came up to the ward with another officer and gave 
it to him, and read his citation out, standing by 
the bed. But he seemed scarcely to know. 

Several other decorations were given also 
to-day, downstairs in the Salle de Jeu. We had 
much to do in our ward, and I could not go 
down. 

Our little 17 received his Cross and also 
his Military medal. He managed to get down- 
stairs and stand up with the others, most of them 
282 



Wednesday, July 26th 

like himself on crutches. Yesterday he had 
news of his mother's death. He told me he had 
never had a father. "II du etre un salaud, ee 
type-la," he told me. His only brother had been 
reported missing since more than a year. He 
kept calling me over every few minutes — when 
he was back in the ward, and in his bed, very 
tired — to show me his medals in their two green 
boxes. He had no one of his own to whom to 
show them. 

There was much big work to be done, and the 
ward was so clouded all day with the choking blue 
smoke of iodine from the hot washings and 
dressings. 

JMadame Marthe was very nervous, and Madame 
Alice seemed especially sullen. 

I wondered — was it that her poor little Jean- 
jean is worse again, there, where he has been all 
these months, in the children's hospital, eared for 
by others than she ? 

I was thinking all the day of it, and never 
dared to ask her. 

Madame Marthe stood all day by the bed of 
34. She would say to him, "Now breathe, 
breathe. Now breathe." If ever she stopped 
saying it, for one instant, he stopped breathing. 
It was as if the only thing he understood was 
that he must obey her. 

283 



Journal of Small Things 

Madame Alice did all she possibly could of her 
work for her, sullenly, together with her own 
hard work. 

It was a very bad day; I am proud to belong 
in such days. 

I was thinking very much of the garden of the 
sphynxes and white peacocks, that is in ruin, 
and of the tower room given over to bats and 
swallows. 

It was beautiful, that mood which is gone, 
but this is more beautiful. 



284 



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